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BY J 

AGNES EDWARDS ^ " ' ^ 



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"Our Common Road" 
"The House of Friendship" 



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THE SALEM PRESS COMPANY 

SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS 
1915 






Copyright 1915 

lY Agnes Edwards Rothery 

Wellesley, Mass. 




JAN 17 1916 



^CI.A418483 




Chapter I. 

Chapter II. 

Chapter III. 

Chapter IV. 

Chapter V. 

Chapter VI. 

Chapter VII. 

Chapter VIII. 

Chapter IX. 

Chapter X. 

Chapter XI. 

Chapter XII. 

Chapter XIII. 
Chapter XIV. 
Chapter XV. 



WiNTHROP Old and New . 
Revere, the Playground of 

Boston 

The Forgotten City of Lynn 
Golden Days in Nahant . 

Salem 

Quaint Marblehead . . 
The Wings of a New Morn- 
ing 

The Fashionable North 

Shore 

Gloucester— Flood Tide and 

Ebb 

A Deserted Village . 
The Romance of Rockport 
An Annisquam Garden . 
Ecclesiastical Ipswich . 
The Whittier Country . 
Charming Old Newburyport 



6 
12 
23 
32 
50 

66 

70 

83 
96 
102 
108 
113 
130 
145 



111 




Winthrop Highlands 1 

Those characteristic beaches and bluffs and rocks 
commence here in full loveliness. 

The Deane Winthrop House, at Revere 2 

One of the six oldest buildings in New England. 
Built by the captain of the Mayflower. 

Revere 6 

With its bandstands, and scenic railways, its merry- 
go-rounds and loop-the-loops. 

The Playground of Boston 8 

Here the city dwellers come in thousands. 

High Rock, at Lynn 16 

That cliff of dull red porphry affording a view not 
parallelled on the New England coast. 

Nahant 23 

Its wild and tattered coast line unmistakable for 
miles around. 

The House of Seven Gables 32 

Salem is rich in Hawthorne memorials, and the 
House of Seven Gables is exquisitely preserved. 

The Salem Custom House 36 

Which faces the wharves which once received a 
yearly import worth $7,000,000 in duties alone. 

Old Tucker Wharf at Marblehead 50 

An abolished Landmark which once stood at the 
present ferry landing. 

iv 



ILLVSTRATIO^S— Continued 



Barnegat in Marblehead 54 

Where notorious pirates stalked the streets, and 
smuggling was indulged in as a legitimate occupa- 
tion. 

The Wings of a New Morning 66 

Where two hundred years ago men were hanged for 
witchcraft, flying machines now circle freely. 

Twentieth Century Progress in Seventeenth Century 

Setting 68 

Far out over the harbor the flight of an aviator 
above the irregular outline of the New England 
coast. 

The Fashionable North Shore 74 

The North Shore of high stepping horses and 
smartly painted traps: of hunting clubs and polo 
ponies. 

Gloucester Harbor 83 

From which a fleet of two hundred fishing schooners 
goes to the Grand Banks. 

Fishing Racks at Gloucester 88 

The smell of fish and salt — curious, indescribable, 
oily, penetrates Gloucester Town. 

A Deserted Village 96 

An oddly impressive spot, revealing no trace of the 
hundred families who lived here two centuries ago. 

Rockport Harbor 102 

Passed by seventy thousand vessels annually, it is 
never ice bound and has excellent holding ground. 

Rockport Quarry Sheds 104 

There are more than six hundred acres of quarry 
land, finishing, cutting and polishing sheds in Rock- 
port. 

Annisquam 108 

To the west across the water swell the white irreg- 
ular sand dunes of Ipswich. 

V 



ILLUSTRATIONS— Continued 
In an Annisquam Garden 110 

A slope of green turf, the pleasant roof of a house 
half way down the cliff, and far below, the calm of 
Ipswich Bay. 

"The First Church" at Ispwich 120 

Meeting house green, which has borne a church for 
nearly three hundred years, is the symbolic center 
of the town. 

Whittier's House at Amesbury 130 

An ordinary building, interesting only because of its 
associations. 

Whittier's Birthplace at Haverhill 136 

The square house in which Whittier was born in 
1807 was built by his great grandfather in 1688. 

The Chain Bridge at Newburyport 146 

Spanning the Merrimac between Amesbury and 
Newburyport. Harriet Prescott Spofford's house 
is visible in the background. 



VI 




Of all the thousands of miles of our inspiring coast- 
line, east and west, there is no part more rich in ro- 
mance, more throbbing with legendary and historical 
associations than the North Shore of New England. 
Try to imagine the story of the early colonists; the 
growth of architecture and literature and religion in 
this country except against this background. It is 
impossible' So much that is of permanent value in 
the poetry and prose of America has its roots in this 
region: so many profoundly significant events of our 
national and social life have developed here, that no 
American who has not at least knocked at the door of 
this treasure house is properly educated in the pat- 
riotic sense ! Much has been written about the North 
Shore, but each new comer finds a new message and 
yields to a spell that can never pall. 



vu 




CHAPTER I 



WINTHROP OLD AND NEW 



Those visitors to New England who have set forth 
upon the pleasurable task of exploring the historic 
and beautiful North Shore must surely begin at Win- 
throp, which is the smallest town in Massachusetts — 
one and sixth tenths square miles — and boasts no less 
than nine railway stations in its limited area. For it 
is one of the most convenient of Boston's suburbs, and 
most popular of Boston's summer resorts, and those 
characteristic beaches and bluffs and rocks, which 
stretch and curve and tumble down past Newbury- 
port, commence here in full loveliness. * 

Beside its thriving summer and winter population, 
Winthrop has many fine old houses, streets and trees. 

*A loveliness that has not escaped the poets. One of the best achieve- 
ments is given on page 163. 



WINTHROP OLD AND NEW 

On the south side of a hill still stand a few reminders 
of the great sassafras grove which once furnished 
sassafras root to London at forty cents a pound! But 
the unique possession of the town is the Deane Win- 
throp House — one of the six oldest dwellings in New 
England. It was built by Captain William Pierce, 
who was commander of the Mayflower and of several 
other vessels which brought Plymouth and Massa- 
chusetts Bay colonists over from the other side. And 
it was bought by Deane Winthrop, sixth and youngest 
son of the first Governor, a farmer and a good one, 
who lived under these sturdy timbers until 1703. 
Substantial, plain and excellently preserved it looks 
forth without resentment upon the twentieth century 
agitation of boy scouts and casual tourists, energetic 
inhabitants and annual summer influx which flood the 
streets of the once sequestered village. Around it are 
playgrounds and parks and club houses : there are two 
forts owned by the United States Government, five 
yacht clubs and more automobiles than horses. But 
within the rooms of the slowly settling cottage the 
great brick fireplaces, the wide pine boards and the 
oaken beams brace themselves for another three 
hundred changeless years. 

The Winthrop Historical and Improvement Asso- 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

elation has bought the place, and carefully preserved 
those relics and data which testify to its heritage. 
You may, if you wish, step under the narrow little 
front stairs into a deep, closely concealed brick recess, 
whose original purpose has long since been abandoned 
and is now forgotten. Standing there in the cool 
darkness you try to imagine for just what mysterious 
use this elaborate cubby hole was intended. Was it a 
smoke house for hams? Was it a hiding place for 
priests who were violating that severe law which for- 
bade them to minister? There is more than one such 
refuge in guileless looking New England farmhouses: 
however, usually in such cases one could enter from 
the fireplace, which is not true here. It is not im- 
probable that it was intended as a place to protect 
women and children if the house should be attacked 
by Indians, although it seems almost too near Boston 
for that. Well, we shall never know, and it will 
stand there with its secret locked by a rude latch until 
the years which will crumble its newer and more pre- 
tentious neighbors will crumble it, also. As we step 
out of the bricked recess and walk about through the 
little cottage with its low ceilings and narrow doors 
and curiously arched support of the chimney — visible 
from the cellar — we have to force our imaginations to 



WINTHROP OLD AND NEW 

picture Governor James Bowdoin, Lady Elizabeth 
Temple and Robert C. Winthrop who all lived here in 
turn in contentment and esteem. Our dignitaries of 
today would hardly find it sufficient. 

The whistle of the narrow gauge train stopping at 
one of its nine stations, the welcoming voices of those 
who have down to ''see it come in" and the sigh of 
relief with which the business men, weary from their 
day in the steaming city, step off and whiff the clean 
ocean air, remind us that we are in a very modern 
suburb. The automobiles chug off: the train pulls 
out: the last straggler directs his steps toward home 
thinking gratefully of his salt water dip before supper. 
Our eyes turn once more toward that survivor of 
another age and time— standing patiently like some 
hale old man who watches the racing and romping of 
his grandchildren and great-grandchildren with an 
indulgent smile about his bearded lips. But in his 
eyes there is the loneliness of one who has outlived his 
generation, and is waiting, uncomplainingly until he, 
too, may be allowed to depart. 





The Pi^roui\d 
of Rostoiv 



CHAPTER II 



REVERE THE PLAYGROUND OF BOSTON 



There is no more perfect beach in all the world than 
that firm white sweep of sand three miles in length, 
which is called Revere. Originally a part of Lynn, it 
curves in a crescent between Winthrop and Saugus, 
and is accessible by train, by trolley and by boat. And 
here the city dwellers come in thousands and thou- 
sands. 300,000 was the number for one hot day in 
June. They flock to the bath houses and swarm 
out over the beach; children, mammas and papas : 
older sisters and rollicking lovers : pale clerks from the 
city and tanned lads from the country: serious faced 
couples whose hoarded scanty savings are barely 
sufficient to cover their car fare and a side show: 



REVERE 

prodigal young society belles and beaux who have run 
through the gaieties of more fashionable resorts. 

Automobiles come tearing down from town with 
hilarious cargoes: the trolleys fling forth a new crowd 
every five minutes: the excursion boat from Nahant 
groans under the weight of its passengers. And the 
smooth blue water and the whitest, hardest of sands 
welcome them all with gregarious hospitality. 

There are bandstands and pavilions at Revere: 
there are galleries where one may have three shots at a 
bobbing wooden duck for a nickel, and sidewalk stoves 
where hot frankfurters are forever sizzling. ''Won- 
derland" — the Coney Island of Boston — is here, raising 
its fantastic structure of painted ''Scenic Railway" and 
its perilous framework of "Loop-the-Loop" against the 
faultless sky. Ice cream cones and salt water taffy: 
fish chowders and peanuts: soft drinks and pop-corn 
are perpetually on the menu of those street shops 
where idling, laughing groups are strolling. Within 
the confines of "Wonderland" all those delights which 
have been concocted to rouse the jaded senses are in 
full ferment: upholstered chariots which lift you with 
a horrible rotary motion above the screaming earth: 
"Shoot-the-shoots" which whirl you through the air 



REVERE 

with sickening velocity : floors that wobble under your 
feet and fireworks that dance before your eyes: and 
everywhere the din of excited humanity. 

You may be scornful of these garish pleasures and 
formulate supercilious remarks about the ''hoi-polloi." 
But the hoi-polloi is wiser than you : it realizes that 
this place has been set aside for its especial amusement 
and it intends to amuse itself here as blatantly as it 
pleases. And, after all, there is something rather 
magnificent in the sight of these thousands and thou- 
sands of men and women out for a few hours of re- 
creation. The tourist in Rome demands to be shown 
the Coliseum. Why? Not merely because of its 
architectural features, but because its bare and shat- 
tered shell still bears mute witness to the huge mobs 
that once assembled there to make a holiday. He 
who is seeking to reconstruct the meaning of the 
Coliseum tries to picture to himself the vividness, the 
roar — the crush and impulse of that mob. History is 
no longer defined as the recital of the deeds of kings : 
it is recognized as the story and the temper of the 
people: what they wanted: the way they worked: 
how they enjoyed themselves: the objects for which 
they were willing to exert themselves: the ideals 

9 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

which appealed to them. And one phase of the de- 
velopment of the United States is exemplified more 
completely by a place like Revere than by all the heavy 
economic tomes that were ever shelved in the recesses 
of a library. 

Stand now, and survey this multitudious throng of 
red capped, leaping bathers — their legs and arms 
twinking against the white background of infinite 
sea, their shrill cries mingling with the strains of 
popular music and the rhythm of the ocean! Yes — 
this is part of New England's historic North Shore, 
and as a part it infuses its tinge of color into the com- 
posite picture of the whole. 

We must not leave Revere without taking one 
glimpse of it from the rear. As the train whirls down 
toward Lynn and Salem we may see from the car 
window the most absurd conglomeration of houses, 
sheds, huts and shanties that ever accomodated a 
cheerful and promiscuous summer colony. Small 
shacks with large piazzas, and smaller ones with no 
piazzas at all : one-story-one-room edifices of tar paper 
and clapboards: shelters improvised from discarded 
electric cars and ancient piano boxes: buildings that 
once were houses and are now sliced in two or patched 
together — bedecked with baby carriages and scatter- 

10 



REVERE 

ing window boxes and clotheslines flappingly burden- 
ed with a casual wash. There are crowded together 
in small settlements like hastily sprung mushrooms— 
or sporadically dotted here and there, on a ledge, in a 
pasture, by a road, or irrelevantly off the road, or 
anywhere at all. As the train curves by you see in 
your imagination not only the little community but 
the spontaniety that went into its rearing: men with a 
half holiday, families with two weeks' vacation, build- 
ing their houses as they lived in them like nautaluses: 
groups of neighbors with little cash and immeasurable 
good humor. 

The train flies past: Revere, with its ''Loop-the- 
Loops" latticed dizzily against the sky, with its peer- 
less sweep of beach and its ephemeral jumble of 
cottages, is gone as swiftly as it appeared— a bubble 
bursting in a many colored splatter of light. 



11 




CHAPTER III 

THE FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN 

The stranger passing through Lynn, conscious only 
of factories and railways, automobiles, trolleys and 
jitneys and all the insignia of a modern industrial 
metropolis is not surprised to be told that this is the 
third city in Massachusetts in value of manufactured 
products and the leading center for women's shoes 
in the world. But he is surprised to hear, perhaps, 
that underneath this brick-bound, teeming city 
there lies another city, almost forgotten, like one 
of those dim churches into which the curious may 
penetrate buried beneath a superstructure of modern 
or medieval Rome. This other Lynn is the Lynn of 
the long silver beach: of storied glens and rocks: of 
leafy shelters and deep woods into which no sound of 
shoe making has ever penetrated, and where the 



12 



FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN 

echoes of crude colonial life still linger like the faint 
sounds of that ancient obliterated church above which 
beat the throb of a thousand unconcious feet. The 
first settlers came here from Salem in 1629 and they 
changed the Indian name of Saugus — which meant 
flat or extended, and was suggested by the broad salt 
marshes — to Lynn, or King's Lynn, from Lynn Regis 
in England. For a long time Lynn — or Saugus — 
included Swampscott, Lynnfield and Nahant, but now 
the old name is only left to the river and fragment of 
the original territory. 

He would see this old Lynn must not content him 
self with glancing at the store houses and machine 
shops, or even at those specimens of colonial archi- 
tecture which survive here as in all New England 
towns, but must find his way to High Rock — that 
cliff of dull red porphyry within the city limits, topped 
with a tower which is to Lynn what the Citadel is to 
Quebec. From it one looks down and out upon the 
kingdom of earth, circled with its shining beaches and 
distant towns and happy meadows, and up into the 
kingdom of heaven springing from the infinite rim of 
the ocean. It is a view not parallelled on the New Eng- 
land coast. * Here on High Rock — which will remain 
forever unchanged in the flux of man-made changes — 

♦Elizabeth Merrill's poem is a pleasant assistance to a more intelligent 
appreciation of the spot. Page 165. 

13 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

one can most easily leave modern Lynn and take the 
first step back into the shadows of Saugus. 

Perhaps the first figure he will encounter on such a 
journey will be Moll Pitcher — she who, when this 
cliff was a lonely and isolated spot, lived at its foot 
for fifty years and told fortunes, quite simply and with 
a terrible surety to the cultivated and the intelligent, 
who made special and clandestine pilgrimages to her, 
as well as to the ignorant sailor lads who came, half in 
fun and half in superstition, when their ships cast 
anchor in Saugus Harbor. She made no explanation 
of her gift — which was not a vulgar fakerism but an 
inexplicable psychic power — and neither her own 
generation nor those that followed have made any 
denial of it. She held Fate in the hollow of her hand, 
and, gazing through the flimsy mortal frame into the 
past and future, directed ships to far ports or foul de- 
cay, and predicted disasters and triumphs that came to 
pass ten and twenty years later. Poems, stories and 
articles have been written about Moll Pitcher, but no 
one has ever discredited the secret or the sincerity of 
her occultism. 

The stranger in Lynn must also go back to those 
unspoiled primeval forests broken by cliffs from which 
one may see the summer colony of Swampscott, the 

14 



FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN 

''splintered spurs of Phillips Head," the peninsular 
of Nahant and the houses of Lynnfield— the modern 
divisions of the ancient Saugus. In the heart of these 
woods are glens and ravines, redolent with historic 
tales of pirates and witches and trampling horse- 
men and charmed circles. Captain Kidd left some 
buried treasure on the Point of Pines— rubies as big 
as a hen's egg and strings of pearls a yard long. And 
they are there today, no doubt, waiting the magic 
key of a twentieth century Robert Louis Stevenson. 

For what more thrilling plot for a Treasure Island 
could Robert Louis Stevenson have desired than the 
story of Pirate's Glen and Dungeon Rock— known to 
every child of Lynn and gravely accepted as part of the 
town's history? 

It began on a summer evening in the middle of the 
seventeenth century when a small and unknown 
bark crept up the Saugus River and cast anchor in 
Saugus Harbor. The people of Lynn viewed it un- 
easily, for credulity regarding ghosts and pirates and 
witches was not confined to the nursery in those days. 
A boatload of men landed and disappeared, and the 
next morning the ship also had vanished. Terror fell 
on the little settlement, especially when it became 
noised about that a note had been left on the anvil of 

15 





High Rock— that cliff of dull red porphyry, marked by a tower 
which affords a view not parallelled on the New England coast. 



FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN 

the village blacksmith, promising that if he would 
bring a certain number of shackles and handcuffs to a 
remote and wooded spot he would find awaiting him 
their weight in gold. The blacksmith's love of lucre 
overcame his fear of the devil. He carried the 
shackles and handcuffs to the appointed spot, left 
them and scooped in the glittering pile. Then, half 
fearsomely, the men began to search the woods, leav- 
ing the women to scan the seas for the sight of a skull 
and cross bones against the sky. But the uninvited 
guests had departed, and it was not until some months 
later that it was discovered that they had again re- 
turned, this time bringing with them a beautiful 
woman. They selected a narrow valley shut in on 
two sides by precipitous rocks, from which they could 
command a view of the sea, and screened by a thick 
undergrowth of evergreen by which they were com- 
pletely hidden. During that winter the simple folk 
of Lynn often speculated about the mysterious glen, 
and when, in the spring, it was rumored that the 
beautiful woman had died and was buried near the 
treasure, a leader, braver than the others, organized a 
band, hunted out the evil doers, captured three of 
them and sent them to England where they were 
promptly hung — this being during England's gibbet 

17 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

craze. One escaped, and a little later wandered back 
to the glen. He was a shoemaker and practised his 
trade harmlessly in the woods, coming to town occa- 
sionally. There seems to have been no complaint 
against him: he neither added to nor subtracted from 
the ill gotten booty, but simply lived with it. There 
were tales, of course. Why not, with an ex-pirate 
for a neighbor? Whether Lynn would have been 
content to let him stay on unmolested will never be 
known, for while they were deliberating, an earth- 
quake shook up the town in an alarming fashion. 
When it came to its senses and took account of stock 
it found that the entire face of the rock in the Pirate's 
Glen had been split off, and that the ex-pirate and 
the treasure were entombed within. 

After this Lynn remained apparently unconcerned 
about the Pirate's Rock until a good many years 
later when Hiram Marble, directed by a spirit medium, 
decided to search for the treasure which had been 
closed by the earthquake doors. It was called 
Dungeon Rock now, and Hiram worked long and 
fiercely to excavate a way through a mass of porphyry 
as hard as adamant. But the spirit medium had 
sent him on a profitless chase, for he died, like many 
another seeking but not finding. His son took up the 

18 



FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN 

excavation work, and claimed to have discovered 
piratical looking relics, but the only money ever un- 
questionably produced by the Dungeon Rock was 
that left by the curious at the door grating of the 
tunnel. 

It was to these same woods that Winnepurkit, the 
Sagamore of Saugus, brought his bride. She was the 
dusk}^ daughter of Passaconaway, the chief and 
wizard of the Merrimac county. Passaconaway sent 
his daughter to her future husband with braves and 
nobles and fitting ceremony, for they were both 
mighty chiefs and proud to honor one another. 
When, after a brief season in the wigwam village of 
Saugus, the bride announced her desire to return 
home to visit her father, Winnepurkit sent her back 
with as distinguished an escort of warriors as had 
accompanied her before. But when, however, the 
lady was ready to return and her father sent word to 
Winnepurkit to arrange again for the body guard, the 
young husband refused, declaring it beneath his dig- 
nity to send his men to bring back what was already 
his own. It was her father's place to furnish escort. 
The Chief of the Merrimac retorted that he had 
sent her once with pomp, and that if she were worth 
coming she was worth sending for. She was the 

19 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

squaw of the noble Winnepurkit and not the daughter 
of the famous Passaconaway. The wrangle continued 
for some time : the father was perfectly willing to keep 
his daughter but his dignity forbade him to bestow 
her twice in the same grandeur. The husband wanted 
his squaw but his reputation forbade his sending for 
what was already his own. And while the two 
chiefs quarrelled interminably, the little wife hung 
dangling between them, until one night she loosed a 
canoe and fled down the river to her husband's tribe. 
But only the broken canoe, empty and wave tossed, 
reached Saugus the following night. 

Besides the early tradition, there is another phase 
of Lynn's history which will always be memorable, 
and that was in the early days of its shoemaking before 
the trade had become specialized as it is today. Then 
everybody made shoes or parts of them. Practically 
all the women and girls of the community stitched 
and bound in their odd minutes at home, making a 
little extra pin money. The men who worked in the 
small shops were intelligent and respected citizens, 
who kept their wits sharpened by having someone read 
the newspaper aloud to them as they worked. Many 
of the noted men of that day and region passed an 
apprenticeship at the Lynn shoe bench. John Green- 

20 



FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN 

leaf Whittier was one, and William Lloyd Garrison 
was another. It was one of those informal industries, 
comparable to cranberrying on Cape Cod a decade 
ago when everybody — father, mother and children and 
grandchildren — all went out to pick on the bogs in cran- 
berry season, taking their luncheon, picnic fashion, and 
transforming the whole affair into a sort of sociable. 
This friendly and genteel activity was characterictic 
of Lynn until the sewing machine appeared in 1852, 
and ten years later steam power was applied to 
machinery. Then everything changed. Factories 
and factory conditions became established, and the 
huge shoe industry of Lynn — which today has an 
annual payroll of $25,000,000 — was born. It is Lucy 
Larcom's ballad of ''Hannah's at the Window Binding 
Shoes" that best crystallizes, in a form which will 
always fill a page of every New England history, the 
spirit of a time when there was certain idyllic touch 
to the home industries of this country. 

This old Lynn of romance and legend and demo- 
cratic simplicity seems at first glance incalculably 
removed from modern Lynn with its fifty churches 
and seven theatres and its myriad complexities of 
urban life. But to those who like to trace the blend- 
ing of the old and the new, there is a peculiar satis- 

21 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

faction in that magnificent boulevard, curving beside 
the ocean for two long and perfect miles. This 
shore drive, with automobiles whirling over it and a 
throng of people constantl}^ moving up and down the 
wide promenade is a ribbon that binds the past with 
the present. For after all, it is not the factories and 
hospitals and postoffices that make Lynn: it is the 
age-old ocean that, long after the last factory has 
crumbled, will beat against the long silver beach as it 
did before the first white men set foot upon it. The 
sky, the woods and the incomparable shore are the 
Lynn that is neither ancient nor modern but of all 
time. 

Such flying reflections glance through the mind 
as one skims along the boulevard to Swampscott and 
Salem.* 



♦Longfellow's "Bells of Lynn" have admirably caught the spirit of the 
'Lynn of all time." Page 167. 



22 




:^^^ 



CHAPTER IV 



GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT 



Nahant, which was the first genuine summer resort 
on the New England coast, maintains a gracious 
prestige to this day, zealously guarding its two treas- 
ures — a striking natural beauty, and a history of in- 
finitely varied charm. 

The embouldered peninsular, attached to the 
mainland by the narrowest of necks, rears itself 
abruptly from the sea — its wild and tattered coast- 
line unmistakable from the ocean or the high inland 
hills for miles around. It is so conspicuous and so 
superbly bold that it is delightfully easy to accept the 



23 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

tradition that the Vikings once landed here — not 
coming from Lynn by trolley as we do today — but 
gliding up in their long boats to one of the little coves 
sheltered by splended spurs of rock quite precipitous 
enough to appeal to the most intrepid of Norsemen. 
We cannot verify the exact spot where Thorwald 
anchored, was attacked by natives, killed and buried 
— for, after all, a saga is not a Baedeker — but, never- 
theless, it seems wholly reasonable to believe that the 
*' rocky promontory," mentioned in the ancient legend, 
was Nahant, and to believe that the dust of the first 
adventurer of our race to set foot on this soil, still 
mingles with the earth we tread today. 

Five hundred years passed, and then the Cabots 
on a voyage of discovery took cognizance of the 
place: hardy fishermen from England and Brittany, 
seeking Eldorado, mentioned it: Captain John Smith 
included it in his map of the coast, and Gosnold and 
his companions, going back to England after a winter 
at Cuttyhunk, took back descriptions that might have 
given Shakespeare his inspiration for the setting of 
"The Tempest." 

One hundred and twenty-five years after the Cabots 
had come on their brief exploring expedition the May- 
flower weighed anchor in Plymouth Harbor, and a 

24 



GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT 

fishing station at Cape Ann was established . And then 
in 1634, Thomas Dexter drove one of those dashing 
bargains which illuminate our early colonial records. 
He bought Nahant from the Indians for a suit of old 
clothes. For a good many years after this it was held 
by the Lynn settlers as pasture land. As William 
Wood, a member of the first settlement has succintly 
explained, ''It is used to put young cattle in, and 
weather goates and swine, to secure them from woolves. 
A few posts and rayles across the narrow necke 
keepes out the woolves and keepes in the cattle." 
It was at this time that land was offered free to any- 
one who would bother to clear it, with the result that, 
in true American style, the trees were promptly 
leveled to the ground, and what had once been a 
heavily wooded place became so barren that years 
later, when people began to consider it a summer re- 
sort, several thousand shade trees had to be planted- 
But in spite of most careful forestry Nahant will 
never be wooded again — that first ruthless beginning 
has left an everlasting wake of barreness. 

During all the seventeenth century this unparallelled 
bit of shore and greenery was considered only as a fish- 
ing place or a woodlot to furnish fuel to Lynn and Bos- 
ton. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth 

25 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

century that it came gradually into its present use. 
And yet this complete disregard for a place which 
would have been crowded with tourists had it 
been situated on the Mediterranean is quite under- 
standable when we remember what hard working and 
meagre lives were forced upon the early colonists. 
They had neither time nor money for recreation: 
travel was slow and immensely expensive. It never 
occurred to a family in ordinary circumstances to 
take a little trip to the seaside or spend the summer 
months at the shore. 

After the Revolutionary War the country re- 
covered from its exhaustion, and commerce gathered 
to itself and diffused from itself a new life : ships from 
Salem and Boston went all over the world, fortunes — 
many of them existing to this day — were made. And 
with the fortunes came the desire and opportunity 
for relaxation. Nahant appeared in a new guise: it 
was the first scene of that phenomenon now so char- 
acteristic of the United States — the summer migrat- 
ion. It is rather interesting to try to picture to our- 
selves those first few scattering visitors. Young men 
came down in sailboats from Boston, or down in 
chaises from town, ploughing cheerfully across the two 
miles of the shingle of Long Beach if the tide hap- 



26 



GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT 

pened to be high — an arduous and difficult trip, 
which only enhanced its romance. More and more 
people began to come. Every house became a board- 
ing house. In 1820 a steamboat route from Boston 
was established, and the steamboat which made the 
trip in three hours was dubbed the ''Eagle" without 
thought of jocularity. And then a hotel was built and 
cottages began to spring up. Thus gradually Nahant 
slipped into the golden period of her long history, when 
not only ''gentleman of wealth and leisure and ladies 
of taste and refinement, with occasionally noblemen 
and persons of distinction from Europe," as an old 
guide book of a hundred years ago says, gathered at 
the place, but the most distinguished men in the coun- 
try established the happy custom of summering here. 
Then it was that Daniel Webster in the full flush of 
his fame, William Story, the sculptor and poet, Rob- 
ert C. Winthrop, senator and speaker of the house, 
Choate fresh from the triumphs of the bar, Oliver 
Wendell Holmes and George William Curtis formed a 
coterie which has never been equalled before or since 
in the history of the United States. One may see the 
modest cottage of Mrs. Hannah Hood where Motley 
began his ''Dutch Republic" and stand where Long- 
fellow stood when he listened to the sweet sounds 

27 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

which were long after echoed in the verses ''The Bells 
of Lynn." There has never assembled a more bril- 
liant American gathering than that which congregated 
at Nahant in those days, and as we stroll along the 
pleasant roads with their careless, prosperous informal- 
ity our sense of enjoyment quickens as we remem- 
ber that here walked Charles Sumner, President 
Felton of Harvard and Judge Prescott.* 

And the thing which brought them to Nahant 
brings the summer visitors today. The gloriously 
wild shore with its crags and castellated cliffs stand- 
ing sharp against the blue Atlantic: the rocks with 
their myriad shadows: the sea with its ceaseless 
rhythm. As we walk along the Cliff Walk where so 
many of the wise and the foolish, the simple and 
great have trod before us, the same curiosities of 
rock formation which were, doubtless, pointed out to 
them with admiring forefinger, are pointed out to us. 
There is Pulpit Rock — a perennial lure to small 
boys to scramble up its sheer rough sides. Natural 
Bridge, The Spouting Horn, Irene's Grotto, The 
Sisters, Egg Rock — an isolated, surf-incircled islet 
crowned with a lighthouse eighty feet above the sea. 
One never tires of enumerating the wonders of this 
beloved coast. 

While it is still untamed — for who can tame the 

♦Story's verses are fraught with a reminiscent sentiment that brings 
Nahant ouiioiisly dose to us. Page 169. 

28 



GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT 

winds and waves and the cliffs? — yet there is every- 
where that mellowness of a place which has been con- 
stantly frequented. Lynton and Lynmouth recur to 
the memory, not because their mild grace is compar- 
able to this stark grandeur, but because of the similar 
sense of companionship with those who have passed 
this way before which clings to those favorite English 
haunts. 

Musing on the famous Cliff Walk, which hugs the 
jutting steeps and ledge and affords the windiest and 
dazzlingest of promenades, one likes to picture the 
long boats of the Vikings which may have anchored 
here, eyed with suspicion and hatred by the red skin- 
ned Indians: the few carefully guarded cows from 
Lynn which grazed serenely in their oases of safety: 
the undaunted little sailboats, tossing down from 
Boston like cockle shells with their cargo of young 
men off for a holiday : and then the first steamer, the 

trolley line across the neck, the first automobile 

and now — a neat and homelike village, with an at- 
tractive club house and library and town hall: with a 
goodly quota of spacious summer homes which are 
rather inaccurately called "cottages," and many 
well-built all-the-y ear-around houses. 

There is every variety of summer life at Nahant to- 

29 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

day. Over at Bass Point the excursion steamers from 
Revere land and empty upon the beach their loads of 
merry-go round riders and imbibers of ice-cream cones. 
There is a dancing pavilion and a band stand: cafes 
and all the paraphernalia for what is considered ' 'pop- 
ular amusement." 

But the genuine Nahant residents hold themselves 
aloof from such frivolity. The dignified residence of 
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge maintains the tone 
which was struck a half a century ago, and of which 
the present day successors of those celebrities are 
fully and proudly aware. 

Brown limbed children sprawl on the rocks of the 
little beaches which are tucked with their bathhouses 
into the sheltered coves. Comfortable automobiles 
pass in leisurely fashion up the unpretentious streets. 
Here and there a stranger peers, seeking for 'The 
Swallows Cave" or Agassiz's cottage, where he wrote 
''Brazil."* 

It is a long time indeed, since the day when Thomas 
Dexter bought the promontory from the Indians for a 
suit of old clothes: a long time from the big snow 
storm of 1717 when the deer, venturing out of the 
woods were pursued by "woolves" and plunged head- 
long into the sea and were drowned: a long time from 

*It is interesting to read Longfellow's sonnet on Agassiz in this connec- 
tion. Page 170. 

30 



GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT 

1749 when hay was so scarce it had to be imported 
from England. And a long time, too, since Long- 
fellow walked arm-in-arm with Tom Appleton — that 
wit and artist and man of letters — and Willis' flashing 
pen struck that description of Nahant which has 
clung to it all these years of "a, mailed fist stretching 
out into the sea." 

We have records of all the early dwellers of Nahant 
but one: Longfellow and Whittier and Mrs Sigourney 
enshrined in their poetry this place of their delight: 
Willis and Curtis sang its praises in prose that was 
read all over the country fifty years ago: even the 
militia from Lynn who were sent out to kill these 
much discussed 'Voolves" are mentioned in the town 
records. But of the Indians, those first fierce and 
faithful lovers of the place, we have no record except 
the name, Nahant. And that name — meaning the 
Twins — has not been altered. Even the men who 
cut down every tree left the word untouched. Per- 
haps they felt even if they did not know the warning 
of the Persian sage who charges us: ''Change not 
barbarous names, for they are given of God, and 
have an inexpressible efficacy." 



31 




CHAPTER V 

IN salem's treasure house 

It was in 1799 that some old sea captains were 
swapping yarns, and were earnestly substantiating 
their recitals by proof positive in the form of curios. 
Determined to convince, one produced a rhinoceros 
horn, another an elephants tooth, another a two-stem- 
med pipe from Sumatra — and lo! the Peabody Acad- 
emy was created! 

To be sure, it was not called the Peabody Academy 
until George Peabody left his money and his name to 
what is now one of the most valuable of all the muse- 



32 



IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE 

urns in Essex County. But the rhinosceros horn and 
the elephants tooth and the two stemmed pipe were 
undoubtedly responsible for the present institution, 
and in glancing back to them we cleave a swift path 
through one of the most varied and glowing bits of 
history in America. 

Let us linger for a morning in this still and well- 
ordered Marine room, where lie the clues to all the 
ramifications of the past, and let them lead us, like 
the magic thread of Theseus, through the winding 
chambers of memory back to the splendid days of the 
last century when Salem's wharves were crowded 
with vessels — barks and brigs and schooners — bring- 
ing in a yearly import worth $7,000,000 in duties 
alone: when wagons crowded the water front and a 
forest of tall slender masts rose against the sky : when 
sailors in pigtails and on sea legs chaffered at the cor- 
ners or bowled down Derby Street to Kit's Dancing 
Hall: when the ship candler's shops were full, and 
sailmakers sat cross-legged in their lofts and stitched 
the great white sheets of canvas: when sea captains 
in ruffled shirt fronts issued grandly out from their 
spacious mansions to watch a neighbor's vessels set 
sail for Zanzabar, Ceylon or Madagascar. For al- 



33 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

most every day some ship fared forth, not to be heard 
of for a year perhaps, or maybe two, prepared with 
guns and small cannon to meet pirates on the high 
seas and cannibals in the Pacific. From this harbor 
sailed the ' 'Atlantic" the first vessel to carry the 
American flag to Bombay and Calcutta: the ''Light 
Horse" with its cargo of sugar to open up our trade 
with Russia: the "Grand Turk" to bring silks and 
nankeens from Bavaria. Nearly everybody had in- 
vestments, picturesquely called "adventures," in the 
voyages of these vessels, and fortunes piled high at the 
time of the Revolution when other ports were closed. 

Mariners born in the shadow of Roger Conant's 
house were in Japan fifty years before Commodore 
Perry, in Guam a century before it was added to the 
United States picket line, and held in prison in France 
and England, Spain and Algeria. The Salem lad was 
a cabin boy at fourteen, a captain at twenty, and at 
forty had amassed a fortune and retired to live at 
leisure in the big house he had hung with trophies 
from over the seas. 

Look at their portraits hanging on the walls of this 
quiet Academy which is now their home: the strong 
boyish face of Nathaniel Silsbee, Merchant of Salem 
and United States Senator: the dignified mien of the 

34 



IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE 

President of the East India Marine Society: the 
bronzed faces and keen eyes of Master Mariners, 
Skilled Navigators and Ship Masters — magnetic with 
the sense of conscious power which marks the young 
and fortunate. For Salem's brilliant prosperity 
flowered while she was still young and sturdy: there 
was no time for the gradual enervation of wealth, but 
only the wholesome acceptance of the bountiful fruits 
of the earth. 

In this small room are preserved mementos as well 
as portraits of men who made Salem famous. One 
may examine images like those seen through the far 
end of a telescope — minute and scrupulous reproduct- 
ons of merchant vessels, precisely as they were rigged 
in each detail when they set forth for Arabia or Van- 
couver. Here are whaling instruments, harpoon 
lances, models of fishing appliances, and sextants of 
two hundred years ago. Here, too, are objects made 
by the sailors on their long voyages; whales teeth, 
curiously carved, ^'jagging wheels" cut in fantastic 
shapes from ivory: sailors knots — mute souvenirs of 
tedious hours of half-bored competition while the 
ship plowed around Cape Horn. Here is an ivory 
pricker used in sail making, a ''mackerel plow" 
to split the fish and score the inner flesh, a tatting 

35 



IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE 

shuttle and bodkin, fashioned, perhaps, with gentler, 
more silent thoughts of home. And here are shelves 
and shelves of the objects brought on the return 
voyage: tinkling pagodas, necklaces of shell and 
beads, tartar boots, idols, corals, war clubs, palan- 
quins, minerals, stuffed gorillas and leopards and 
gaily plumaged tropical birds. These are still left to 
tell the story of those lavish argosies, as rich as any 
pirate ship that ever floated on enchanted waters. 
The ginger has disappeared from the quaint round 
ginger jars: the monkeys that swung from their 
perches and the parrots that chattered from their 
cages in the shops of every corner dealer — these 
have gone the way of all flesh. But the touch of 
Orientalism which once made this New England town 
different from all other New England towns before or 
since, still lingers here like the faded colors in a once 
sumptuous rug. 

This Orientalism is one of the several links in the 
rather curious similarity between Salem and Venice. 
There is little now in the modern second-rank metro- 
polis with its steam cotton mills to remind one of the 
city of lagoons, but nevertheless the lives of the two 
run in peculiarly close parallels. Both were orig- 
inally asylum cities, both began as fisherfolk in rude 

37 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

huts, engaged in free boating and small trading in 
convenient waters. All communication, social and 
commercial, between the log built villages along the 
shores of Salem was originally carried on in dugouts 
or canoes, crude, frail affairs, not unlike the early craft 
of Venice. This maritime commerce gradually grew 
until Salem gained, first the monopoly of the salt fish 
trade — again like Venice — then a more general mar- 
ket, and finally, like that other mistress of the seas, 
undertook the importation of silks and spices and 
precious commodities, and became magnificent. The 
leading commercial families formed an aristocracy 
not unlike the ''close gild" of Venice, and when the 
Revolution shut one port after another from Savannah 
to Boston, Salem rose to a period commenserable with 
the zenith of her Italian Sister in the fifteenth century. 
And just as the discovery of the Cape Route to the 
the Indies, diverting the stream of traffic from the 
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, cut the taproot of the 
prosperity of the latter, so the railroad which sent all 
Salem's activities through the gateway of Boston, 
sounded the first note of her decline. And finally it 
is not stretching the comparison too far to recall that 
since the maritime decay of Venice the beauty of her 
palaces has remained an enduring attraction, and that 

38 



IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE 

although the commercial prestige of Salem has long 
since waned, each year sheds a brighter luster on 
those remnants of colonial architecture which border 
her streets and are not equalled anywhere else in the 
length and breadth of this country. 

Take the Pickering house on Broad Street, with its 
spreading trees, its curiously shaped chimney, narrow 
hallways and winding stairs. It was built two hun- 
dred and fifty years ago, and has ever since been kept 
in the possession of the same distinguished family. 
Take the Andrews house in Washington Square, gray 
faced and white trimmed, with a circular porch and 
tall colums fashioned of bricks that were dipped in 
burning oil to preserve them. The pillars are bal- 
asted with rock salt that John Andrew's ships brought 
back from Russia a hundred years ago. The stairway 
in the Pickman house is ornamented with carved and 
gilded codfish — a naive explanation of the origin of the 
family fortune. The Pickman Brook house place 
boasts an opening in the window blind where the spy 
glass used to rest as it sighted the incoming ships, 
while on the ceiling of the cupola sails forever a fresco 
of the Derby fleet. On Federal Street stands the As- 
sembly Hall where Washington and Lafayette danced, 
and now as then it maintains a personality dignified 

39 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

and serene, with Ionic entrance and fluted pilasters. 
Chestnut Street is Uned with mansions, square, well 
built, not a little suggestive in their proportions of 
buildings of the Italian renaissance. Some of these 
Salem dwellings have paved courtyards, nearly all 
have big old fashioned gardens, and besides these com- 
mon possessions each one jealously guards its especial 
treasure — such as a stairway with a twisted baluster 
and newel post, a handsome wainscoting, carved pan- 
els or a secret closet. The porte cochere of the Em- 
merton house on Essex street is one of the most perfect 
specimens in this country, and the doorways, many of 
them made from bits of shaped wood, pillars and col- 
umns brought over in the cumbersome holds of those 
ships which plied between this and the mother country, 
are the despair and rapture of antiquarians and 
architects. Rich in carving and brave in new paint and 
shining knockers, they shut behind their portals the 
memory of their golden days. Golden days, indeed, 
when Salem had a mandarin in her own right — Gener- 
eral Frederick Ward who led the Chinese troops 
against the Tai Ping rebels and was rewarded with the 
red button and the peacock feather of a mandarin of 
the first rank, and honored after his death by a 
temple and a pagoda in the land of his prowess, as 

40 



IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE 

well as a decree that he be worshipped as a deity. He 
married a Chinese wife, and his portrait hangs in the 
pleasant Essex Institute as placidly as if he had never 
swung through such an extraodinary cycle of ex- 
perience, nor stirred from the conventionalities of a 
New England town. Days when the houses had 
folding doors that could be turned back and thus 
convert the whole lower floor into a ball room, where 
gentlemen in ruffs and ladies in powder curtsied de- 
murely in the candle light through the long numbers 
of the minuet. Then it was that merchants were 
called Kings, and Elias Hasket Derby — he whose 
cupola bears the frescoed Derby fleet — dying, left 
the largest private fortune accumulated in America's 
eighteenth century. 

But these days were not the oldest days. Before 
the tide of wealth broke on Salem's shore bearing on 
its crest the ambition for stately mansions hung 
with balconies and sweetened with gardens, simple 
gambrel roofed homes, very charming and unpre- 
tentious, were considered quite sufficient. Many of 
these gambrel roofed houses still stand in fair pre- 
servation, not yet wholly wearied by the long pro- 
cession of births, marriages and deaths that pass in 



41 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

and out — in and out — in solemn inevitability over 
their worn thresholds. 

And before the gambrel roofed house there was the 
plain frame house with low ceilings showing hand- 
hewn beams, a lean-to, and a long sweep of shingled 
roof. In the rear of the Essex Institute stands a 
very remarkable example of this era — second story 
overhang, diamond paned windows, well -sweep, 
bucket, little corner shop and all. There is even a 
posy bed in which are allowed to grow only those 
flowers which were cultivated in Salem before 1700, 
and near by is a shoemaker's shop with the benches 
and tools of 1830. 

While there is hardly a street or yard in Salem that 
has not embedded in itself one of the somber or gay 
threads of her long history, yet it is in the Peabody 
Academy and Essex Institute, two buildings almost 
directly opposite each other on Essex Street, that 
these multifarious filaments are gathered into a 
master tapestry, so clearly woven that even the most 
casual may read, and so comprehensive that even the 
scholar may study with profit. 

It is characteristic of the completeness of the In- 
stitute that it should also contain a complete and life 
sized reproduction of the interior of the house whose 



42 



IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE 

exterior stands in the rear. Here is the kitchen, its 
floor sanded, its open fire place flanked by a roasting 
jack and a wooden settle, its walls decorated with 
wooden trenches and bread troughs, with a handmade 
clock and corner cupboard. In the bedroom stands 
an old fashioned fourposter, impressive in its full 
number of hangings — it took twenty-eight pieces to 
make the complete set — and a trundle bed peeps out 
from under the maternal petticoat. Here hangs a 
framed sampler: on the painted floor lies a braided 
rug. The Franklin stove — that grateful innovation — 
is cornered by a winged chair, and on the high-boy 
are ranged those entrancing painted band boxes that 
gave the final feminine touch to the stage coaches as 
they lumbered out of town. The parlor is also com- 
plete: the pictorial paper, the hand carved mantel, 
the spinet made in Salem, and the Sheraton sofa and 
chairs, all typical of the home of 1750. 

These four rooms fill one side of the big hall and are 
barred off from profane intrusion. But the atmo- 
sphere of the past does not end with the end of this 
charming series. All about the other three sides 
stand relics of long ago : old walnut and maple chairs, 
chests and yarn reels, a settle brought from Normandy 
by the Huguenots in 1687, hand mills, hair cloth trunks, 

43 



THE ROMATIC SHORE 

and even a prodigiously clumsy one horse chaise. 
There is quite a remarkable collection of the costumes 
of 1819: bonnets and mantles and wedding garments, 
infants' clothes with their infinitely fine stitches, 
christening blankets and ball gowns of a generation 
long since turned to dust. Wonderful it is and rather 
solemn that a museum can catch and hold under its 
glass cases so much of the aroma of a day that 
is dead. 

In the library, which is under the same roof but 
across the hall, are over a thousand log books, 
filled out in the careful penmanship of a more pains- 
taking age, many of them illuminated in sketch work 
in pen and ink and in colors comparable in nicety to 
the lovingly wrought missals of medieval times. 

Standing thus and looking at the earthly trappings 
of men and women whose very names have become 
obliterated on their tombstones, we can think of the 
darkest episode in the history of Salem with the 
curious detachment with which one turns the pages 
of an ancient book. 

The witchcraft craze was a madness that swept 
New England. The grewsome fear swept over all the 
colonies, and in Salem in the winter of 1692 the fear 
foamed into a fury. The people of that sedate town, 

44 



IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE 

once roused to action, refused to be deflected from 
their stern resolve to sweep such heathenish machi- 
nations swiftly and forever from their sacred borders. 
Tituba— an African servant who filled the minds of 
some hysterical children with superstitions and in- 
cantations, and subsequently threw them into fits 
in which they accused her of witchcraft — Sarah Good 
and Sarah Osborne were the first to be examined, 
found guilty and hanged. The superstition was on, 
and Salem went wild with terror. Accusations were 
no longer confined to women of Tituba's stamp, but 
people of character were implicated and convicted 
on the most trivial of evidence. Everybody believed 
everything, and suspected everybody else of diabolical 
compacts, and secret leagues with the Devil. ''Spec- 
tral evidence" by a deluded child was sufficient to 
indite a minister or a woman of repute. For one 
terrific year Salem was a veritable fiery furnace of in- 
dignation. Nineteen supposed witches were hanged 
on Gallows Hill— none were burned in this town of 
delicate distinctions in the ways of death. And then 
the wave subsided. Saddened and sombered, Reason 
came back to her own, and the judges bowed their 
heads in repentance. Gallows Hill remains today 
bare of cultivation, black and ragged: a few crooked 

45 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

and rusted pins, which were supposed to have been 
used by the witches to torture their innocent victims, 
are exhibited in the court house to the curious. 
Salem is sorry for her mistake, but does not ignore the 
picturesque elements of that era. 

But there are no mementos of that other fantastic 
error into which phe fell almost immediately after 
her recovery from this one — and this was the cruel 
persecution of the Quakers. One can buy witch 
spoons in silver and gold, and stick pins with an evil 
visaged old woman astride a broom stick; one may 
climb Gallows Hill and read the death warrant of 
poor foolish Briget Bishop. But nowhere is pre- 
served the whip that scourged t^he backs of the un- 
fortunate Quaker folk who offended through their 
very inoffensiveness. 

Thus Salem, like a preserve of her own making, 
piled the enchantment of architecture upon the ex- 
citement of legend, the rich flavor of history upon the 
intoxicating aroma of adventure, the piquancy of too 
sweet, too bitter tradition upon the light power of 
gayety. And in due time came one who drew a 
silver blade and carved a slice of the fruity mixture, 
and placing it upon the embossed salver of his im- 
agination, laid it before the world. For as an angelic 

46 



IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE 

face sometimes seems to form from the shadows of a 
chamber hung with gently moving tapestries, so from 
the tradition -laden atmosphere of Salem, with its 
sumptuous old mansions, its gilded mirrors and bro- 
caded chairs, carved doors and gleaming white man- 
tels, with its well kept museums and wide shaded 
streets and its ghostly ranks upon ranks of ancient 
chronicle, formed the delicate and melancholy genius 
of Hawthorne. 

One sees how every phase of his environment laid 
a deepening shade upon his pensive temperament. 
The gambrel roofed cottage at 7 Union Street, where 
he was born; the ugly house at 10}^ Herbert Street, 
where he spent his solitary youth, and which has 
lately been turned into a still uglier "three decker," 
but still clasps the ''little window" under the eaves: 
the residence at 53 Charter Street to which he came 
as a lover and which still stands, shabby, low studded, 
cornered by a graveyard : the Custom House where he 
worked unjoyously — facing the delapidated wharves — 
all of these mingled in a soft and composite picture 
which he threw again and again on the screen of his 
romances. 

Salem is rich in Hawthorne memorials, but the 
glamor flushes most rosily over the House of Seven 

47 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

Gables, where "the Dutchess" lived and where the 
novelist often came, contented to sit in the white 
panelled parlor and look out through the deep win- 
dows across the garden sloping down to the sea. 

The house with its heavy oak door studded with 
iron nails, its tiny gift shop — Hepzibah's shop — its 
long low dining room and its concealed stairway, is 
exquisitely preserved. And if the guardians have too 
conscientiously charted and named each room in 
accordance with the story — for one may see Phoebe's 
chamber and Clifford's chamber, and the spot where 
Judge Pyncheon sat dead — (in spite of Hawthorne's 
assertion that his ''house" was built of materials 
long since used for constructing "castles in the air") 
nevertheless, it is entirely fascinating and well worth 
a fee of admission. Near the many-peaked abode a 
little bakery, restored to its condition of two hundred 
and fifty years ago, its hand hewn beams crudely or- 
namented with auger holes, and hand-split clapboards, 
untouched by modernism, is another milestone on the 
road back to yesterday. 

"The House of Seven Gables" flickers with the 
lights and shadows of fancy, but "The Scarlet Letter" 
glows with the intensity of a more vital purpose. 
In this tragedy Hawthorne climbed to the summit of 

48 



IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE 

his art. And here in the Essex Institute, from which 
we need hardly have stirred in all our wanderings, lies 
under glass the very volume which bears the statute 
which suggested the theme — a grim transcript of 
man's spirit in a grim time. It was Sir James M. 
Barrie who thought this blurred and terrible little 
book the most curious of all Salem's reliquae. 

For, after all, the ends and the beginnings of Salem's 
history are gathered up in her two treasure houses, to 
be preserved for generations of those who care to 
ponder over them. Could Pegasus be pictured as a 
span, could the imagination be the reins to guide, then 
in a golden car to whom distance is nothing and time 
a mist, one might wheel back through the decades of 
city that once lived to the full in romance and delight. 

The trip is over: the enchanted coursers lose their 
magic shape and become mere buildings of wood and 
stone, with shelves of tabulated cases. The reins of 
imagination drop from our hands: the golden car 
dissolves. We stand on the noisy Essex Street of a 
modern city, and hear the whistle of the train that is 
to bear us away. 

♦Salem made a profound impression upon Story which he has delight- 
fully preserved for us in rhyme. Page 171. 



49 




CHAPTER VI 



QUAINT MARBLEHEAD 



Down a narrow tumblilng road, around a comer, up 
a hill — around a corner and down a hill — a sharp 
turn to the left, a crooked turn to the right, houses 
packed as tight as sardines in a box, some facing the 
street, some standing sideways to it, and gardens or 
graveyards in every patch as big as a pocket hand- 
kerchief — there never was such a higgle-ty-piggle-ty 
place in all the world as the town of Marblehead. 

Here is a straggling lane down to the sea; there is 
one bordered by a gray stone wall and knarled willows 
opening to rock riddled pastures. In the rear of that 
old fisherman's house lies an overturned catboat 
being ''caulked," and in his neighbor's front yard is a 
dory, domesticated into a nasturtium bed. 



50 



QUAINT MARBLEHEAD 

We pass the handsome white house where Elbridge 
Gerry, signer of the Declaration of Independence, 
Governor of Massachusetts and Vice President of the 
United States, was born. Down a slope and along a 
side street: there is the house of Skipper Ireson, cen- 
tral figure of Whittier's poem which has been de- 
claimed by three generations of amateur elocutionists. 

" He sailed away 



From the leaking ship in Chaleur Bay — 
Sailed away from a sinking wreck. 
With his own townspeople on her deck." 

And for this evidence of his "hard heart" he was 

'Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart 
By the women of Marblehead." 

Marbleheaders have long declared this popular 
ditty to be untrue. But at all events the skipper's 
house is still pointed out among the first of historic 
landmarks — yellow, shabby, unspectacular.* 

Round a corner and up a devious grade, 'The 
Brig," neat, cheerful for all its eerie history— smiles 
demurely down upon us. It was here that Edward 
Dimond — pronounced a wizard by the simple fisher- 
men of his day — spun his supernatural tales, and 
where his daughter, Moll Pitcher, was born, she whose 

•The poem is given in full on page 173. 

51 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

occult powers were of such a penetrating order that 
she must not be confused with vulgar fortune tellers, 
but regarded as one of those gifted psychics who 
leave no successor and no key to their mysteries. 
Three more turns and a blind alley: we pass the 
"Spite House," a decaying earthly remnant of a feud 
long since dissolved by death: down a break-neck 
incline and two more turns — there is the Old Powder 
house, which held the ammunition of the thrifty in- 
habitants during the French and Indian and Revolu- 
tionary Wars and the War of 1812. It stands in well 
preserved stolidity, complacently unaware of the 
proportions of a modern magazine. 

What? Another turn? One understands why 
the horses look sleek here: what speed is possible in a 
labyrinth of streets that would make Clovelly look 
like a boulevard? And what happens to automo- 
biles? One scrutinizes the pedestrians to see if they 
have developed some anatomical peculiarity from 
stumping over these terrestrial vicissitudes. 

These plain houses, flush with streets that bear the 
names of the patriots Captain John Selman — naval 
officer in the Revolution, and Colonel Azor Orne, 
another of our Vice Presidents — these houses sheltered 
merchantmen and navigators, stern judges and up- 

52 



QUAINT MARBLEHEAD 

right statesmen in colonial days: now many of them 
have ''Antiques" painted on their front doors, and 
blue plates alluringly arranged in their small paned 
windows. 

The old Town House stands by itself on a little 
oasis in Market Square, dumb witness to town meet- 
ings for over one hundred and seventy years: it was 
the scene of the recruiting of the famous Marblehead 
regiment in 1776, and the assembling of the Marble- 
head Light Infantry in April, 1861. Now the Grand 
Army has its headquarters there: a flag waves lan- 
guidly from the loft up under the roof, and traffic 
eddies desultorily around it. 

Pushing our way along the meandering street, we see 
people suddenly appear from little flights of steps that 
connect one irrelevant thoroughfare with another: 
everything is criss cross and up and down, and incred- 
ibly involved; the points of the compass shift confus- 
edly with those of the weather vane. 

That gambrel roof we are passing bears half a hun- 
dred bullets in its stout timbers: this one at the junc- 
tion of Hooper and Lee streets had that corner sliced 
off so that Lafayette's carriage could pass by; in yon- 
der modest house lived Evalina Bray, Whittier's first 
and only love; on the King Hooper Mansion, once as 

53 



QUAINT MARBLEHEAD 

magnificent as its title suggests, with banquet hall and 
coat of arms, a tea-room sign is swinging. 

Marblehead is undoubtedly one of the most pictur- 
esque towns on the United States. It is, and always 
has been, entirely different from the other New Eng- 
land settlements. At the time when Salem was deter- 
minedly laying down the law and abiding by it, Mar- 
blehead was engaged in smuggling with all the compos- 
ture of a legitimate occupation. While Ipswich was 
piously fining the wives of its deacons for wearing 
silk bonnets to church, notorious pirates openly stalk- 
ing the streets of that section still called ''Barnegat," 
and sailors in pigtails, citizens in periwigs, and women 
in kerchiefs and hobnailed shoes conferred in a strange 
gutteral patois, which never was a part of the English 
language any more than Marblehead was part of the 
Puritan commonwealth. 

There is a pungency in the tradition — well authen- 
ticated — that in the early days when none but church 
members might hold office under the Puritan law, 
Marblehead having no church members, settled the 
question by dispensing with all government for nearly 
half a century — and settled it with a profanity which 
added to the horror of its well-behaved neighbors. 

For the men who landed on this surf-swept ledge 

55 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

were not looking for farms but codfish: as soon as the 
boys were old enough to pull an oar they followed the 
men to sea, while the women stayed at home and did 
the shore work. In the fishing season there were no 
more men in sight than in those deserted Italian villages 
to-day, where a handful of women and a few goats are 
all that are left after the yearly immigration to America. 

For half a century after the first rude cabins were 
raised there was no settled minister and no school- 
master. When strangers appeared on the streets they 
were hospitably pelted with stones; when sailors 
landed they were treated to a glass of grog or a pipe 
full of ''dog leg" or *'pig tail." What could be more 
natural than that a multitude of superstitions and 
wierd legends, lawless customs and curious dialects 
should spring up, and that two centuries should not 
succeed in levelling them to the dull tone of the com- 
monplace? 

Thus it was that the old English custom of saluting 
the moon had its counterpart in Marblehead, where 
the young girls, on nights when the moon appeared, 
would' gather at some house to catch a glimpse into 
the future. They would hang an iron pot of tallow 
over the open fire and one by one take turns in drop- 
ping hob nails into it. If a young man should enter the 

56 



QUAINT MARBLEHEAD 

room he would surely become the husband of the girl 
who at that moment had dropped the nail. The be- 
lief, too, that if a maiden should throw a ball of yarn 
out into the street, the young man who stopped to 
pick it up would become her lover, gave rise to many 
romance^. These and a hundred more old folk tales 
were retold from one generation to another and fol- 
lowed conscientiously by the maids of Marblehead. 
Of course they had their witch, 

''Old Mammy Redd 
Of Marblehead," 

who soured the milk in the churn and spirited away 
the linen and pewter and plagued the cattle and 
crossed young lovers. She was hanged, chiefly upon 
old wives' gossip, and the Marblehead superstitions 
continued as before. 

There are two stories connected with Marblehead 
which every stranger should know, and which have 
given the theme to more than one novel. The history 
of Agnes Surriage has been recited so many times that 
one cannot improve upon its telling, but it contains 
such indistructable elements of romance that no one 
need hesitate to try. Ouida and Henry James could 
both find material here. 

57 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

Sir Harry Frankland, heir to an baronetcy in Eng- 
land, handsome, dashing, youthful, collector of the 
Port at Boston, was called to Marblehead to locate 
smugglers. But at the Fountain Inn where he stopped 
he met an enemy more destructive to his peace of mind 
than all the smugglers in creation — an enchanting, 
barefooted, sixteen-year old girl, industriously scrub- 
ing the floor. Sir Harry, brilliant man of the world 
and haughty man of fashion, lost his steel clad British 
heart there and then, and after some rather pretty 
p'arlaying took the fisherman's daughter to Boston 
as his ward to have her educated. All went well 
until the little girl grew apace, her beauty increased, 
and her intelligent young mind expanded. And 
then Sir Harry, bewitched and bewildered, found him- 
self in desperate plight. He could not lay his um- 
blemished name and title at a scrub girl's feet, and he 
would not relinqiush the radiant treasure almost 
within his grasp. Tradition has it that she settled 
the vexed question herself: she was made to love and 
to be loved: she ignored worldly warnings and seized 
the larger issue. 

But Puritanical Boston would sanction no such 
freedom. She might have gone back to her scrubbing, 
or have been hidden somewhere by her lover: but to 

58 



QUAINT MARBLEHEAD 

frankly live an adoring and joyous life of shame was 
not to be tolerated. So Sir Harry built a fine house 
in Hopkinton and developed a great plantation where 
he and Agnes Surriage lived for several years. The 
hospitality of the mansion and the charm of the lady 
of the manor still cling to Hopkinton by-ways, for 
although the elect passed by on the other side with 
eyes cast down, strangers visiting the province, men 
of learning wit and parts, the poor and the oppressed 
of the neighborhood often sought the shelter of those 
deep porches and the welcoming cheer within. In 
course of time Sir Harry even ventured to take the 
Marblehead maid to England with him to visit his 
family who promptly refused to recognize her. Fin- 
ally he was called to Lisbon on business, and there 
their life was less critisized. But when the fair, 
faithful lady who had suffered the humiliation of her 
position so many years begged for the title of wife, it 
was denied her. 

When in 1755 the great earthquake shook down 
the city of Lisbon, Sir Harry lay with many 
others under a crumpled wall. Agnes Surriage, 
qiuckened by her love and sustained by the endurance 
born to Marblehead girls searched frantically until 
she found the spot where he lay, and then tugged at 

59 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

the stones and dug with her hands and screamed for 
help until she rescued him: whereupon her lover, 
touched by so heroic a passion, made her Lady Frank- 
land. And then the elect of London and of Boston 
lifted their eyes and held out their hands and admitted 
her into their midst, and to this day relics of the splen- 
did estate at Hopkinton are sold at fancy prices: the 
site of the house on Beacon Hill where she was shunned, 
and the fountain of the Inn in Marblehead where Sir 
Harry first saw the dainty ankles of Agnes Surriage 
as she scrubbed the floor for his passing, are pointed 
out to strangers.* 

Although Marblehead never boasted the aristo- 
cratic dwellings of Salem, nevertheless one of the 
very finest mansions of all colonial times is preserved 
here, and as it is the property of the Historical Society, 
is accessable to all. It was built in 1768 and cost ten 
thousand pounds: about one hundred feet long and 
sixty deep, three stories, of brick — originally clap- 
boarded — both the design and the timber came from 
England. There is a magnificent hall, running from 
front to back, with panelled walls and a sumptuously 
wide stairway with baluster of twisted and polished 
mahogany. The picture wall paper, the perfect 
panelling, the secret stairway, the finished cornices 

*Eveii Oliver Wendell Holmes could not resist the temptation to versify 
this romantic tale. Page 176. 

60 



QUAINT MARBLEHEAD 

and the handwrought nails all deepen the beauty of 
the picture which the imagination so readily recon- 
structs. In the kitchen food for a hundred could be 
prepared, as in a Medicean palace, and from the side 
hall opened the door to the slave quarters. It is not 
difficult to image Washington in these spacious cham- 
bers as he was in 1789, as were Munroe, Lafayette 
and Andrew Jackson later. The regality of the pro- 
portions is proud proof of its glory. 

Another unique building in Marblehead is St. 
MichaeFs Church — the second oldest in this country. 
It was brought from England in its entirety, frame- 
work, pews, altar, gallery and reredos, and set up 
in 1714 on the spot where it now stands. The organ 
that played the wedding march for George Washington 
and Mary Custis in Philadelphia has been brought 
here, and a silver cross made from the ancestral plate 
of a Marblehead family gleams in the tranquil light. 
It is a small church, in spotless preservation, with 
many treasures locked within its simple walls: altar 
clothes embroidered in real pearls and real topazes: 
an alms basin of solid silver too heavy to be used: a 
brass chandelier which was presented by the port col- 
lector of the port of Bristol, England in 1732. One 
may see the place above the chancel where King 

61 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

George's Coat of Arms was torn down by excited citi- 
zens the day when Independance was declared, and 
the bell that was rung on that same day until it 
cracked. Like many other old churches in New Eng- 
land it has its cemetery around it, but unlike the 
others it has a sepulchre beneath its floor where, for 
over a hundred years, pew holders were privileged to 
lay their dead. 

Up from the precipitous shores of Marblehead jut 
lofty headlands from which the visitor may catch a 
sweeping panorama of the most popular yachting 
port on the Atlantic seaboard. There is Crocker 
Park and Fort Glover, Peach's Point and innumerable 
others, but perhaps there is no place in all Marble- 
head more poignant and impressive than the old Bury- 
ing Hill. The ancient gravestones of those earliest 
inhabitants have been erected, not in a secluded 
valley such as we associate with the last resting place 
of those who have toiled hard, but upon the summit 
and the sides of a flinty hill, windswept and barren. 
Whitefield, when he visited the brine-drenched village 
and saw the houses clinging to the ledges and the 
roads straggling as best they might between the 
ridges which dissect the town, asked mildly, ''But 
where do they bury their dead?" For indeed, there 

62 



1 



QUAINT MARBLEHEAD 

seems hardly enough earth to cover them! But they 
were buried on the hill so as to be near the church, and 
the church on those days needs must be on a hill top 
so that the sentinels might see the Indians if they 
approched at time of worship. There is something 
rather touching in the reflection that those sturdy 
men of Marblehead might not be granted peace even 
in death, but must lie forever on a wind lashed hill, 
from whence a vigilant watch against the enemy 
could be held. 

There are venerable gravestones here, carved slate 
ones against which the rains have beaten for two 
hundred years, and faintly arabesqued with quaint 
inscriptions and ornamentation. Perhaps the in- 
scription on the Great Gale Monument will give us a 
moment's pause, reminding us how frail are man-made 
vessels in the fury of the storm. It reads: 

"LOST 
On the Grand Banks of Newfoundland 
In the Memorable Gale of September 1846. 
65 Men and Boys 
43 Heads of Families 
155 Fatherless Children 
'The sea shall give up the dead that were in it.' " 

63 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

The site of the Fountain Inn where Agnes Surriage 
looked up, shy and .startled, at the gold lace and 
brocade of the youthful customs collector: the Old 
Brig where Moll Pitcher first opened those eyes which 
were to see so many sad and strange visions of this 
world and the next, before they closed in death — these 
lie to the leeward of the graveyard. One can see the 
spire of Abbot Hall where the spirited figures of 
Willard's famous canvas march forever onward, and 
the spire of the Catholic Church — that ''Star of the 
Sea," by which many a vessel has steered her course. 
Out in the harbor are sonder boats and catboats: 
motor boats, yachts, knockabouts, ferries. From 
the shore of Marblehead Neck and its summer colony 
rise the outlines of the Corinthian and Eastern Yacht 
Clubs. The Boston Yacht Club is across the harbor. 
A little later a star will twinkle from the twin lights 
of Baker's Island, from Marblehead Light on the 
Point, from Hospital Light in Beverly and far to the 
south from Minot's Ledge. 

It is all here — the new life and the old. The bones 
of those rough fisherfolk who swore and drank and 
pirated and fished two centuries ago, the shreds and 
patches of the uniforms worn by earnest patriots 
who fought so passionately on land and sea, mingle 

64 



QUAINT MARBLEHEAD 

without discrimination with the dust of black and 
faithful slaves. 

From this Burying Hill one can look down into 
Marblehead with its streets, spattering against the 
ridges and flowing jerkily along the lines of least 
resistance. Those crooked lanes with their crowded 
houses lead back into the past. But over yonder, 
to the west, lies the wide state highway, with automo- 
biles flashing smoothly by — past Marblehead, on to 
the life of today — on to Beverly and Manchester. 



65 




CHAPTER VII 

THE WINGS OF A NEW MORNING 

Those astonishing advertisements of cities where 
one may see Cleopatra chatting affably with Daniel 
Boone, and Aeneas languidly gossiping with Queen 
Elizabeth and Huckleberry Finn, are not more sur- 
prising than the phenomenon which the passersby in 
Marblehead may witness almost any day. For the 
former is an assemblage of incongruities deliberately 
composed for the very obvious purpose of the moving 
picture business: and the latter is one of those un- 
consciously striking and vivid examples of twentieth 
century progress in a seventeenth century setting. 

One of the largest aeroplane factories in this country 
is at Marblehead, and half an hour from the city of 
Salem, where two hundred years ago men and women 



66 



WINGS OF A NEW MORNING 

were hanged for displaying supernatural powers, men 
in strangely quivering vehicles are gliding out on the 
water, rising into the air, and then circling round 
and round like monstrous birds, flying freely across 
and forward and back, then decending and alighting 
with perfect equanimity. 

Since the outbreak of the European War the aero- 
plane business has established itself on an entirely 
practical basis. Even those who have never actually 
seen one accept the fact of its existance as calmly 
as that of the telephone or automobile. But in spite 
of our sophistication there is still something inexplic- 
able that sends a healthy thrill up our spines, and 
wrings an involuntary ''ah-h" from our lips when we 
see these latest and most audacious of all man's in- 
ventions scaling the invisible ladder to the sky — 
rising up over our heads — and floating out to sea. 

This same sense of awe lingers as we are taken 
through the factory and see the shining linen sails, 
taut and gleaming, the unassuming little engines, and 
the immense rudders which are to control the machine. 

There are a hundred and fifty men working furi- 
ously on the hydro-aeroplanes in this factory which 
was once a shipyard. They are stitching the vast 
pieces of linen on sewing machines that carry incredibly 



67 





f'fp' 






i\ 






WINGS OF A NEW MORNING 

huge spools of thread and stitch two rows at a time: 
they are shaping by hand the graceful mahogany 
propellers, unholstering the compact bodies, and 
fastening securely the smooth braces and girders 
of spruce and ash. 

It is marvellous to survey the swift construction 
of these flying machines so "lightly, beautifully 
built," with every line made slim for speed, and strong 
to carry its half a ton of engine, passenger, machinery 
and fuel. Even the most untechnical observer is struck 
by the detail with which the principals of strength 
and lightness are carried out. The smooth frame- 
work of the wings and of the body is honey-combed 
with holes to reduce its weight. 

Here in a shed they are packing the completed 
machines, laying each perfect piece carefully upon 
another in a specially prepared box, bracing them with 
a few strokes with screws and a cleat. These packing 
boxes will be shipped on transatlantic steamers to 
witness — who can tell what scenes on the North Sea? 
Out in the harbor lies the houseboat of an American 
millionaire waiting to carry home its master's last 
and most expensive purchase. We are gazing at the 
final word in private luxury and modern warfare. 

The quaint town of Marblehead and the ancient 

69 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

city of Salem to the west settle drowsily into their 
undisturbed antiquity. But in the buildings of what 
was once a shipyard is the multifold activity of me- 
chanics and draughtsmen. What centuries of human 
inventiveness have gone into the perfection of these 
machines now being turned out with such speed and 
sureness! And now, when the thing that was the 
dream of Leanardo da Vinci has become the instru- 
ment of warfare, sport and science, it looks so frail 
that one wonders that the first fierce wind does not 
crumple it like a broken leaf. But the wings of the 
modern Icarus withstand both sun and gale. 

The hum of machinery — the cheerful sound of men 
at work — the strange parts of the monster bird wait- 
ing in inarticulate suspense: and far out over the 
water the whirring flight of an aviator, sailing out 
and up above, the irregular shoreline of the New Eng- 
land coast! 



70 




CHAPTER VIII 

THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE 

On entering the Garden City of Beverly one enters 
the precincts of the fashionable North Shore: the 
North Shore of shaven lawns and deep bright gardens: 
of wide driveways curving up through the woods to 
the great estates hidden beyond: of high stepping 
horses and smartly painted traps: of limousines with 
chauffeurs in livery: of elegant victorias with old 
ladies and pug dogs. And, as is often the way with 
the most exclusive exclusiveness, the pleasant roads 
do not glare with ostentation, but, on the contrary, 
veil themselves in the shadow of apparent simplicity. 
The sumptuous residences with their sun parlors and 
loggias and ball rooms are hardly visible from the 
public highway: one must take a steam launch and 



71 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

hug the shore, eyes glued to the mainland, to get a 
glimpse of them, perched on the rocks, hanging above 
the ocean or set back in lawns that slope down to the 
edge of the sea. Over two hundred twentieth cen- 
tury palaces may be seen on the trip from Salem 
Willows to Magnolia. Millionaires, politicians, belles 
and beaux come from all over the world, embroider- 
ing a little more richly every year that line of aristoc- 
racy which fringes this section of the Essex coast — 
some to find a summer home, some to build a perma- 
nent one. 

The stranger passing through Beverly, Manchester- 
by-the-Sea and Magnolia will gather an impression 
of well kept roads, of vine covered fences higher than 
his head. He will go through a grove of dark hem- 
locks, catch a glint of a red roof of an unpretentious 
bungalow set among the trees, pass the imperial gate- 
way to some lordly , "cottage," a rustic wood path 
down which a group of horseback riders flash, an acre 
of lawn where a dozen men are reverently kneeling, 
removing with solicitude a handful of vulgar weeds, 
a country farmhouse stranded at the crossways, 
another high fence, and then — suddenly — the sea! 
For the sea — of sapphire and opals — is the pot of gold 
at the end of this especial rainbow. To get a piece of 

72 



THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE 

ground fronting it would cost you a small fortune — if 
indeed you could procure it at all. Ten thousand 
dollars have been paid, more than once, for an acre 
on this water front. 

Of course this means that the casual passer-by may 
not take his wife and six children and picnic basket and 
find a sunny spot on the beach where they may sprawl 
and bathe. He may travel for an hour and count 
himself lucky if he gets a glimpse of old Neptune at all. 

But the deprivation to the casual passer-by is the 
advantage of permanent dweller. This combination 
of woodland and shore, this mingling aroma of pine 
and brine is not surpassed anywhere in the world. 
Many an English visitor stands in wonderment sur- 
veying a country house at the Cove or the Farms or 
at Prides and then asks puzzled: ''But why do you 
talk about our English country places?" 

Beverly — which includes North Beverly, Beverly 
Farms, Montserrat, Pride's Crossing and Beverly 
Cove, is the geographical beginning of what many 
people consider the real North Shore, and may also 
be considered the chronological beginning of the 
present North Shore Colony. In the early forties 
when it began to be sought by Bostonians who wanted 
a change without travel, it was merely a collection of 

73 




O <4-l 
rd O 

Ph a 



bC c3 



03 



a 
o 
d 'o 



o s 
o o 



^^..i/-.:^j.fe]iL[^.'"L->^, 3^«j^;"'f j^.B[) 



THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE 

rural houses and pastures. Peter Pride's farm stood 
near where the country road now crosses the railroad 
track, and there is a story that he received the grant 
of an immense tract of land on the condition that he 
willingly direct all passers by. This he did for many 
years, and the place came to be known as Pride's 
Crossing. The property passed from one Pride to 
another until the place came into its popularity as a 
summer resort. And then the Pride who held it 
sold his birthright for a song, and afterwards, the 
story assures us, overcome with remorse, hanged 

himself. 

The original summer houses were dull colored, com- 
fortable edifices surrounded by broad piazzas and 
sloping roofs. Today there are million dollar man- 
sions, with pipe organs and private bowling alleys, 
green houses and tennis courts. One garden stretches 
down to the very sea, eight hundred feet long and 
four hundred wide— inexpressably fair in its orna- 
mental brick walls, shaded walks, raised terraces, a 
tea house of stone, a peristyle for climbing roses and 
seats of marble and stone . 

To be admitted into this guarded circle is like 
stepping over the page into the reality of a chapter 
of Henry James, where the heroine drifts across a 

75 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

garden while a peacock trails its feathers in the sun 
beside her. You, too, if it vouchsafed you, may- 
step upon tapestried brick, feel the flicker of cool 
shadow from a marble pergola, and lean on a balus- 
trade built after the fashion of that at Tivoli where 
countless men and women have leaned and looked out 
over the blue Campagna, beautiful in the beauty of 
level lines. You will not see the Campagna, but another 
plain, as blue, as misty, with all traces of its mighty 
traffic as smoothly obliterated. You are surrounded 
on every side by the luxuries of nature and of civili- 
zation. Before you glitters the ocean with its rim 
of pleasure domes and its burden of pleasure craft: 
on either side woodland and shore melt in harmony 
or dazzle in contrast. Behind you sparkle the gay 
towns of Hamilton and Wenham and Topsfield, 
with their golf links, hunting clubs, polo ponies and 
all the equisite equipment of costly amusement. 

It is hard to realize that there were once old breast 
works back of the lighthouse which gleams so white 
in the sunshine, and that the land which is now so 
preciously divided into private domains was a great 
training camp in the time of the Revolution. Hard 
to realize that the venerable Roger Conant — he whose 
gallant statue braves the winds in Salem — petitioned 

76 



THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE 

the General Court in 1671 that the name of Beverly 
be changed to that of his native town ''Budleigh," 
because of '' the great dislike and discontent of many 
of our people for this name of Beverly because (we be- 
ing a small place ) it has caused on us the constant nick- 
name of 'Beggerly.' " Hard to realize that the pretty 
woods now so fondly tended and so carelessly roamed 
through were once whispered to be bewitched, such 
terrifying roars and howls issued from them in time 
of storm, and such difficulties attended the traveller 
seeking his way on dark nights. In fact it is quite 
impossible to realize anything but the faultless lovli- 
ness of the day and the sheer delight of soft living 
that surrounds us. 

As you go from Beverly to Manchester you will 
see the justly celebrated Mingo Beach about which 
there still echoes the tradition of Robin Mingo — a 
slave who had been promised his freedom on the day 
that the ebbing^ tide should leave a dry passage be- 
tween Mingo's Beach and a rocky promontory called 
Becky's Ridge. He waited patiently for this great 
event, and then, one morning in 1773 when the re- 
ceding tide did actually leave a dry passage, the 
kindly neighbors ran to tell him of the news. And 
awed and half terrified by the strange significance, 

77 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

they found the black man had indeed attained his 
freedom on that day, for he was lying dead — a smile 
upon his lips. 

You will also pass the old fashioned square house 
where Lucy Larcom lived,* and the one from which 
Oliver Wendell Holmes dated his letter ''Beverly-by- 
the-Depot" poking gentle fun at his friends Mr. and 
Mrs. James T. Fields who were the first to use the 
name of Manchester-by-the-Sea. 

But Manchester-by-the-Sea it has remained ever 
since, becoming more proud and handsome every 
year. Like Alice in Wonderland after eating the 
mushroom it has grown prodigiously from its early 
days, when it was known as ''Jeofferye's Creek." — 
not taking the name of Manchester until 1645, when 
it separated from Salem and became a distinct town. 
But it clung to its provincialism for a long time after 
that separation, as is testified by the church quarrel 
of 1809. For when the meeting house in the square 
was built, with its graceful belfry and steeple, the pro- 
posal to heat it on Sundays was stubbornly opposed 
by that conservative element which, like the poor, 
is ever with us, especially in matters of ecclesiastical 
dissension. However the progressives won, and duly 
announced that hereafter the church would be heated 



♦What ia probably Lucy Larcom's best known poem may be of interest 
here. Page 179. 

78 



THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE 

on the Lord's day. The next Sunday several of the 
congregation fainted during worship and others had 
to leave overcome by the excessive temperature. 
Presumably they were from the ranks of the recusants, 
for after service it was discovered that owing to a 
defect in the heater no fire had been built. 

But Manchester's peculiar attraction is that beach 
of ruddy sand — a warm tawny pink — which, when 
a carriage drives over it or people tread on it gives 
forth a crisp note, something like snow under foot 
in dry cold weather. This odd formation of the 
atoms which makes them triturate together in keen 
musical vibration has poetically christened it the 
Singing Beach, a wonder of the world and a never 
failing scourse of entertainment. 

On through West Manchester — ^the hidden country 
seats and tasteful cottages still following in unbroken 
continuity — to Magnolia, named from the white 
magnolias, found nowhere else in Massachusetts, which 
grow profusely here — their ivory blossoms delicately 
starring the twilight of the pines. Magnolia, the 
village of hotels, situated on a point almost surrounded 
with water, is redundant with walks and drives. 
And why not, when one of the largest unbroken 
stretches of woodland in Massachusetts, two miles 

79 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

long and about six wide, extends through here across 
Cape Ann? There are land views and ocean views: 
wood walks and sea walks, drives and vistas that 
offer a perpetual objective to summer strollers. One 
may spend a summer here and not exhaust the cor- 
ners of this leafy shade. 

But there are three walks which are especially 
characteristic of Magnolia, and the first, of course, is 
to the Reef of Norman's Woe. Named early in the 
seventeenth century for the Norman family who lived 
near, it was not until the dreadful gale of 1839 when 
forty dead bodies were washed up on the Gloucester 
shore, one of them that of a woman lashed to a spar, 
that Longfellow, deeply impressed by the event, wrote 
in a single night the ballad which will perpetuate his 
name long after many of his more ambitious works 
have been forgotten. Thus the rock, which was the 
scene of a shipwreck, became a literary monument as 
well, and still rears its head above ''the white and 
fleecy waves," that look ''soft as carded wool," while 
the surf churns and creams about it. The sound of 
the wind and the water, and the beating rhythm of the 
ballad surcharge the place with strange noises, like 
Prospero's enchanted isle. One may sit in the huckle- 
berry patch in a long, long revery, while the waves 

80 



THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE 

beat ceaselessly on the rock whose cruelty has sent a 
vicarious thrill through many a shivering nursery 
circle. * 

The next walk in Magnolia is more cheerful: it 
is no other than through the Colonnade — those ab- 
surdly Parisian beads strung upon a superfine chain of 
portico, tiled floor and gleaming window. You are 
down on Cape Ann with barren sea sand stretching for 
miles to right and left, to be sure, but you may pur- 
chase a diamond tiara or peach Melba or any frivolity 
that occurs to you quite as conveniently here as you 
might on the Rue de la Paix or Fifth Avenue. En- 
trancing and quite wickedly seductive little shops — 
their gem-like wares spread out alluringly behind 
glass or ranged on spotless shelves and polished tables 
— exotics of New York or Newport, securely planted 
on plain New England soil! 

Your third walk in Magnolia should be through the 
almost historic and not at all gorgeous hotel which 
never advertises and is always beseiged by more of the 
^iite than it can accomodate. Here one may meet 
diplomats and foreigners, smart folk from all over the 
country, and may witness dances where the toilettes 
vie with those of opera night. Incidentally of course, 
there is a view from every window, and always the 
sweet tang of Cape Ann air. 

♦The poem is given in full on page 181. 

81 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

But the North Shore means more to its wealthy 
residents than a rendevouz of style, and everywhere 
are evidences of their sincere attachment to the place 
and their desire to enhance its value in a broader 
sense. At Magnolia, for instance, there are two very 
attractive and complete clubhouses for ''Those who 
work," chauffeurs and waitresses, bellboys and others 
of that vast retinue that serves the summer colonists. 
They are unique and successful social experiments. 

There is an aviary and a gladiolus farm which is an 
inspiring adaptation of western ideas to eastern con- 
ditions, where worn out New England soil has been 
made to produce acres of superb flowers by proper 
treatment. Everywhere are tea rooms and club 
houses and bits of public landscaping initiated and 
financed by summer people for the advantages of the 
natives — tangible proofs of a very real interest in 
Cape Ann. 

The migratory population is packed from one end 
of the North Shore to the other from June to November. 
From Winthrop to Plum Island their cottages and 
their activities are paramount. But perhaps in no 
other section have they shown themselves a more 
intelligent and constructive force than along the 
''Fashionable North Shore." 



82 




CHAPTER IX 

GLOUCESTER — FLOOD TIDE AND EBB 

A smell of fish and salt and drying boats : a curious, 
indescribable oily smell, unlike any other and permeat- 
ing every other: the smell of Gloucester! And why 
should not this hoary metropolis reek with the flavor 
of fish when its history is built upon the sign of Pisces, 
and its prosperity has sprung from it? When we 
stand in the center of Gloucester town, a quaint and 
crooked center with hilly streets winding into it and 
twisting out of it, we stand in a place which, as early 
as Revolutionary times, had a yearly catch valued 
at one hundred thousand dollars and in the later part 
of the nineteenth century was the largest fishery in the 
world. 



83 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

Even today, with its interests diffused into other 
channels, a fleet of two hundred or more vessels beats 
out of the harbor in season bound for the Banks, for 
Labrador, Iceland, Greenland and Norway. 

Those racks, or ''flakes" lining the shore, covered 
with rippling canvas or glistening with their naked 
burden, are sagging beneath hundreds of barrow loads 
of cod and haddock, split and spread to dry in the 
sun. In those gray sheds they are being boned, 
shredded, packed in balls, in strips, in boxes to be 
sent to every conceivable market in Christendom. 
The factory has come to augment the shed, and the 
by-products which used to be thought waste are now 
being made into glue, cod liver oil, and various kinds 
of fertilizer. The market for these is as certain 
as the market for the fish itself, and if the workers 
are no longer hale New Englanders but dark skinned 
Finns and Portuguese, chattering an unintelligible 
tongue, it is all in the march of progress. 

If you will stand where the road from Fresh Water 
Cove curves up into the Stage Fort Park you will see 
in the harbor a forest of slender masts, and with the 
puffing of the engines and flapping of the sails a 
vivid panorama of the old and the new. That brig, 
which recalls the Cape Ann fleet of square riggers 

84 



GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB 

that sailed to the West Indies, probably has salt for 
curing in her hold, and packed so tightly that it will 
have to be mined out with pick and shovel. That 
Schooner — which was developed from the pink — 
had its origin in Gloucester, like Universalism : the 
prototype of that motor boat was first used for fishing 
purposes in 1900. For the rest there are freight 
steamers plying between the Cape and Cadiz, steam 
yachts, cruisers and pleasure craft of all description. 
There is one tall spire against the sky to our right 
which rises, not from the harbor but from the shore — 
the spire of the wireless station where experiments 
are constantly a.nd quietly being carried on. 

This Stage Fort Park, in which we stand, a lovely 
rolling tract of pasture on the Western Shore extend- 
ing from Fresh Water Cove nearly to Blynman Bridge 
which joins Cape Ann to the Mainland, embraces 
three beaches and some noble groups of rock. It was 
originally ''Fisherman's Field" and was the first land 
cleared in Gloucester. A fishing stage was here, long 
before any permanent settlement was attempted, and 
on Stage Head was reared the second fort. Hence 
the name to distinguish it from the old fort. 

Gloucester has been called a ''city of sorrow, whose 
history is written in tears" for, when a whole commun- 



85 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

ity makes its living on the open sea, death sweeps over 
it with the sweep of every storm, and that yearly mid- 
summer ceremonial when the children of the town 
gather to cast flowers upon the receding tide in memory 
of the dead, is both symbolic and touching. The 
pathos of many of the legends and much of the litera- 
ture of Cape Ann is the integral part of a life where 
widows and orphans and maids who never will be 
wives wait continually for a vessel to return with her 
flag at half mast for those who have been lost at sea. * 
And yet, oddly enough, Gloucester was not original- 
ly a fishing village. Standing on a series of narrow 
ledges, rising like terraces from the harbor, at the back 
of each terrace was once a swamp, leaving but meagre 
strips of building land on which the houses were 
crowded together. Thus it was that when the 
farms gave out in 1727 the men migrated to Salem. 
Those who were left made a living by cutting timber 
and shipping it to Boston in boats made in the harbor. 
When the timber was used up they utilized the boats 
for fishing. The Revolution ruined the industry, 
as it did so many of the towns along the North 
Shore, but in 1860 the tide turned, the demand re- 
vived, and since then has continued with superficial 
fluctuations. 



♦"The Phantom Boat" has a certain value when read in this connection 
Page 184. 

86 



GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB 

Possibly it was for this reason that the iSrst settle- 
ment was not at the harbor, but on ''the neck of 
house-lots" between Mill Creek and Annisquam River 
— the salt creek which makes Cape Ann an island. 
At the south end of this neck stood church and par- 
sonage, while the first ''burying ground" — a spot well 
deserving a visit — lay nearer the harbor. Here the 
rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep under small 
cubical blocks of undressed stone without inscription. 
Slate head-stones adorned with winged skulls were 
imported for the next generation. 

Influential church members finally procured the 
removal of the First Church to the harbor. The 
"West Parish" across the river was the second parish. 
Then Annisquam was set off, and when the members 
who remained "up in town" wanted the old meeting 
house re-opened they had to be the Fourth Parish — 
much to their chagrin! 

The great grandsons of some of those who petitioned 
that re-opening were among those who later frequented 
the sea captains' reading room in the old Gloucester 
Bank Building. Here stories which were passed from 
mouth to mouth in leisurely hours first began to cir- 
culate and still echo in the annals of the town. 
Stories of merchants who had sent fish or mules to the 



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GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB 

West Indies, Portugal and Spain, receiving in return 
molasses, sugar, liquors, strange fruits and old Dutch 
silver and china. Stories of voyages to Sumatra to 
buy pepper and weigh it on the beaches, not daring to 
go a step further inland for fear of the unhealthiness 
which lurked behind those tropic sands. Stories of 
the far away Philippines, where the sun-burned voy- 
agers from the new world had been welcomed into 
strange and beautiful houses like those in an Arabian 
Nights' entertainment with windows of mother of pearl 
to keep out the sun and let in the light, with dark pol- 
ished floors on which gleamed the cane furniture : and 
the story — often repeated — of how in the thirties, three 
vessels coming from three different quarters of the 
globe all met in Manila harbor. As they exchanged 
salutes, each vessel ran up the American flag; for those 
three ships, which had been ploughing the seas from 
one end of the world to the other, were three Boston 
ships commanded by three Cape Ann men! Thrill- 
ing recitals and humorous ones — told again and again 
to the eager ears of listeners who had heard them 
many times before. 

These adventurous sea captains brought back bits of 
Oriental bric-a-brac, pieces of sumptuous drapery and 
odd carvings which still ornament their brave home- 

89 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

steads where their portraits, painted in conscientious 
exactness, look unyieldingly forth upon the comings 
and goings of their descendents. 

Much that was quaint and pleasing in that life is 
still treasured in the summer colony of East Gloucester 
where artists love to go, and where the gardens of mea- 
dow sweet and deutzia, larkspur and roses which once 
delighted the eyes of men home from sea are still fondly 
tended. Many of the spar shops and seine lofts, block 
and sailor shops have been changed to studios, tea 
rooms and antique shops : and many of the fisherman's 
cottages, and the places which handled oil clothing and 
deep sea outfits have been remodeled for the conven- 
ience of the fleeting summer guest. But the charm of 
Gloucester has not been lost in the gradual evolution, 
and the same rambling roads and unexpectedly per- 
fect colonial doorways with balustraded fences and 
posts topped with great white balls and back yards 
nodding with sunflowers have been preciously pre- 
served. 

From East Gloucester one may cross to Rocky Neck, 
where Champlain is said to have landed, and gaze from 
its ridge out on the inner harbor full of boats and bor- 
dered with its utilitarian two-story sheds and build- 
ings, and see the site of the old Fort where children 

90 



GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB 

have flown their kites for fifty years, and see, too, where 
the ''western shore" slopes to Half Moon Beach to the 
left, and the coal wharves and hoists and fish signs 
close the curve on the right, and see the Christopher 
Wren spire of the famous first Universalist church. 

It is worth while to trudge to Eastern Point whence 
on a clear day the dim streak of Cape Cod is visible. 
The outer shore of this point stretches toward Thatch- 
ers Island, and has been the inarticulate witness of 
thousands of passing sails — sails which must seem in re- 
membrance like the fluttering wings of sea gulls, wheel- 
ing in myriads against the limitless sky. But of that in- 
numerable procession which has floated by, three ships 
have left behind a wake which will never be obliterated: 
the Steam Ship Portland whose lights were last sighted 
from here before she foundered, the boat of Anthony 
Thatcher which, in 1635, with his children met a 
tragic endingforever recalled in the name of Thatcher's 
Island and in Whittier's ''Swan Song/'* and another 
boat more significant than them all — the Mayflower, 
which, carrying the nucleus of a mighty nation, passed 
this self same point. Perhaps another boat should be 
mentioned here, for it was Eastern Point Light which 
was seen by the interrogative child on the fabled 
Schooner Hesperus. Fresh Water Cove lies yonder, 

♦Given on page 186. 

91 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

which many people have forgotten and more have 
never known took its name from a fresh water spring 
which was covered at high tide. 

It is a flawless drive or walk around the devious 
Gloucester shore from the ''top of the Point" to Bass 
Rocks with the ocean on the right where gayly clad 
groups are picnicing, building fires on the rocks 
from driftwood if the evening is chilly, and with the 
golf links, summer cottages, hotels and little settle- 
ments on the left. This joyous atmosphere is quite 
different from the cruder, darker quaintness of 
Marblehead: its happy informality quite unlike 
the patrician dignity of Salem with which there has 
always been a sisterly rivalry. Gloucester, and par- 
ticularly East Gloucester, is the colony of all others on 
the North Shore painted, loved, written about and 
lived in by artists who have never exhausted its 
peculiar witchery. 

On Middle Street there survive several houses of 
Revolutionary Days: the one which belonged to the 
widow Judith Stevens — she who married Murray, 
the founder of Universalism — has two huge chimneys, 
one of them out of plumb, and the two story extension 
in the rear is pierced with little port hole windows. 
One enters through a gate set in a panelled brick wall. 

92 



GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB 

Under the gambrel roof of the Babson house is much 
valuable old furniture and even specimens of the pens 
once used for the slaves. The Ellery house, the Stan- 
wood house at West Gloucester, Byle's tavern at the 
entrance to Beachbrook Cemetery and the Briggs 
house at Annisquam are all of interest to the hunter 
of antiques. 

Should the sturdy builders of these homes return for 
a day to their earthly habitat, what wou]d surprise 
them most? The scattering golfers on the well-kept 
links where there was once only barreness and waste? 
The populous summer hotels with their laughing girls 
and white trousered youths? The artist with his easel 
and box of paints? The Italians and the Finns who 
are doing the work which the Gloucester boys once did? 
Or the Portugese settlement on the high hill above the 
''head of the harbor" where, in the late fifties, a simple 
voluble folk, fleeing from famine at the Azores, found 
a spot which closely resembled their old home? A 
matchless view may be had from this hill, given an 
oddly foreign touch by the glimpse of the church far 
below. It is, perhaps, at this new Portugese church, 
bearing an image of Our Lady with a ship in her hands, 
that the staunch old Puritans returning to earth would 
gaze at most long and curiously. This church of "Our 

93 



^^ 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

Lady of Good Voyage" where on Whit Sunday the 
blessing of the loaves and the covering of the Madonna 
takes place, strikes us as very prettily naive, reminding 
us of that other fishing village of Amalfi, where St. 
Andrew the fisherman is duly reverenced. But doubt- 
less those stern non-conformists would see only idolatry 
here, and would be willing enough to stalk back to their 
graves, where they would be undisturbed by any vision 
of popery. 

And yet those first comers might better survey in 
pride that one time fishing settlement to which comes 
now an annual school more profitable than any earlier 
catch — men and women in holiday humor and with 
memories of foreign travel and a taste for what is fit- 
ting to repaint the falling houses and replant the neg- 
lected gardens. Gloucester has changed hands, it is 
true, but it is in good hands, nevertheless. There is 
no conflict between those transitory groups who come 
for the summer months and those gracious ''natives" 
who still maintain their spacious homesteads, and 
dispense a hospitality far famed and justly founded. 

And yet, with all its evolutions, one fancies there 
are two threads woven into the woof of what is called 
the "atmosphere" of Gloucester, which will never 
change: the flowers, in window boxes and in small 

94 



GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB 

gardens and big ones — blue and white and lavender 
and rose, ''flavored by the sea," as Lucy Larcom says, 
*'and colored by the salt winds and the sun into the 
healthiest intensity of bloom" — thesfe will climb over 
the rustic gateways and the beckoning doors so long 
as lovers of the beautiful return to this loved spot. 
They typify the joy of Gloucester. And that other 
thread which will always carry its dark shadow in 
spite of the increasing care and safety devices of 
modern days — the sense of sorrow which is a part of 
every place which makes its living on the sea. Well 
may "Our Lady of Good Voyage" tenderly protect 
the ship upon her arm. For all her care many women 
for many years will weep tears as salt as the waves 
which have buried their husbands, sweethearts and 
sons. For the sad dirge that men must work and 
women must weep is chanted in every fishing village 
by the rhythm of the ocean 

"The night has fallen and the tide 
Now and again comes drifting home, 
Across those aching barrens wide 
A sigh like driven wind and foam 
In grief the flood come bursting home." 



95 








CHAPTER X 



A DESERTED VILLAGE 



A deserted village — so utterly forsaken and for so 
long that there is nothing left except a few goose- 
berry bushes and lilac trees by the cellars, a tumbling 
stone wall and an overgrown clearing : nothing— not a 
stick — that was ever part of man's habitation. 

This curious plateau between Rockport and Glou- 
cester — roughened by huge boulders, its unnatural 
solitude forever undisturbed except for an adven- 
turous cow or a stray berry picker, its streets and 
yards so completely obliterated that if you were not 
looking for it you might pass through and never 



96 



A DESERTED VILLAGE 

realize that this was the place — this is Dogtown 
Common. 

Ruined cities are very rare in America, especially 
those that were inhabited by white people whose 
decendents are living today. But Dogtown not only 
has a history, but one which is fairly well authenti- 
cated, for archeologists and geologists and local his- 
torians, fascinated by the very blankness of the spot, 
have investigated and ferreted about and reconstructed 
and compared gossip and ancient records until they 
have pieced together a very comprehensible account. 

To get to Dogtown from Gloucester is the thir- 
teenth labor of Hercules. The few maps and written 
directions usually add truthfully: "but the roads do 
not quite intersect," and the oral directions which 
one gleams from colloquial advisors run something 
like the playful information which Launcelot Gobbo 
offered his father, and not infrequently end; ''keep on 
after the road gets rotten, but when it gets so rotten 
you can't keep on any more — that's Dogtown 
Common." 

Needless to say, this devious way is impassa- 
ble for a carriage or an automobile, and in cer- 
tain weathers for pedestrians. Swamps and thick- 
ets and blind paths surround it as zealously as a 

97 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

vigilant mother guarding an unalluring daughter 
whom she is sure some one will try to kidnap. No 
one wants to do anything to Dogtown except look 
at it, but that innocuous desire is fanned into an in- 
tense passion for achievement in the process of plowing 
through a swamp or two, climbing fences, tearing 
clothes on bushes and snags and scratching hands 
and faces on briars and losing the barely perceptible 
thread of a path a dozen times over. But if you are 
anything of an explorer by the time you have fathomed 
the intricacies of Dennison's road and Whale's Jaw 
(if you come from Annisquam) or Webster Street, 
Lamb Ledge, Railcut Hill and Parting Path (if you 
come from East Gloucester) or the old Sandy Bay 
road (if you come from Pigeon Cove) you will 
emerge upon the hidden village with the triumphant 
thrill of Cortez when he stood upon that peak in 
Darien. And it is an oddly impressive spot — a rock 
strfewn waste encircled by a girdle of woodland and a 
more distant one of sea — revealing no trace, until one 
examines it minutely, of the hundred families who 
lived here two centuries ago. If you are meticulous 
you will draw a fine distinction between Dogtown 
Village and Dogtown Common, but if you are merely 
curious you will be quite content with any arrival 
at any section of what was once Dogtown. It was 



A DESERTED VILLAGE 

never a prosperous community. It got the latter 
part of its name from the custom of the inhabitants 
to hold land in common, and the first part from the 
dogs which the widows — there was an unconscionable 
number of widows — kept for company and protec- 
tion. But in spite of its humbleness some of the most 
respected families in Gloucester and Cape Ann are 
proud to trace their ancestry back to it — the Boyn- 
tons, Youngers, Milletts, Stanwoods, Wilsons and 
Friends among them. For although in its declining 
days a somewhat unsavory reputation attached itself 
to the dying village, it was the degeneration of what 
had doubtless been as sturdy and decent as any other 
New England settlement. 

Standing on this homely Salisbury Plain, we find 
ourselves wondering why any one ever built in such 
an inaccessible spot, or why, having done so, they 
abandoned so completely the work of their hands. 
And yet neither the origin nor the decay of Dogtown 
is mysterious. 

Before the bridge was built at Riverdale the main 
road from Rockport to Gloucester ran by Dogtown, 
and the settlement sprang up as naturally as a mush- 
room by a foot path. Then when the traffic began 
going the other way the little village declined like 

99 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

a ''boom town" in the West when the railroad turns 
elsewhere. 

Fragments of gossip still linger about the place: 
gossip about ''Tammy Younger," "queen of the 
witches," sharp-tongued and profane, she whose 
cellar is the first one as you enter by Fox Hill. Tam- 
my, whose real name was nothing less impressive 
than Thomazine, smoked as well as swore, and the 
handsome snuff box which was found in the cellar 
not so very long ago seems to indicate that she also 
took snuff. Gossip about Old Ruth, a mulatto who 
called herself John Woodman and dressed like a man 
and built stone walls and whose name is commemo- 
rated in Ruth's Ledge: about Easter Carter, aristo- 
cratic and poor, who lived in the only two-story house 
in Dogtown and picked berries and told fortunes for 
her scanty living. Toward the end of her life and 
the end of Dogtown days her house was an objective 
for picnickers, for she would boil them a cabbage for 
their dinner. Thus the origin of the "cabbage dinner 
picnic" which is still a Cape Ann institution. Molly 
and Judy Rhimes were not at all respectable: Peter 
Lurvey was a revolutionary patriot of no mean 
order: Johnny Morgan, whose real name was Morgan 
Stanwood, made a living cobbling shoes in a hut 
under a rock, and his "Boo", or Booth, was one of 

100 



A DESERTED VILLAGE 

Dogtown's most familiar sights. Captain Isaac Dade, 
after a life of adventure, came back to Gloucester 
with a charming Southern wife. Fancy lingers a 
moment about the woman who had been a friend of 
the Washingtons and whose youth had opened on the 
wide acres of a Virginia Plantation, and whose final 
days closed here in the little village of Dogtown. 

There are records of most of the Dogtown inhabit- 
ants: who they married and when they died: there 
are scraps of rumors about the most picturesque of 
them — more or less irrelevant or pertinent — which 
have persisted through the years. But nevertheless, 
there is in this deserted tableland an indescribable 
sense of desolation. It is a singular thing to stand 
in a place from which every trace of life has been 
obliterated. The smooth hills of Carthage over 
which the sheep graze peacefully is not swept cleaner 
of human impress than this. For although we can 
never reproduce the life of two hundred years ago, 
yet in towns and cities where that life has gone on 
without a break, the past has fused with the present 
as a current runs into the sea. But here there has been 
no continuation, only a decay and then a vanishing. 
There is a sadness in this complete oblivion, 
"Where once the cottage stood and hawthorne grew" 
— an infinite pathos in the gray solitude from which 

the flush of life has fled. 

101 





CHAPTER XI 

THE ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT 

A network of black wires against a serene sky: 
the hardly perceptible tremor of the arm of a mighty 
derrick: and the sheer cold sides of a granite quarry 
not unsuggestive of the concrete sides of the Panama 
Canal in its smoothness and its strength. We are in 
Rockport, that Uttle town on the North Eastern tip 
of Cape Ann whose quiet fields have been split wide 
and forced to deliver up their tons of tons of granite — 
gray and red and green. As we stand here on the 
brink of this cold precipice, so cleanly, deeply hewn, 
we seem to be looking down into another world, 



102 



ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT 

rigid and unreal. The puff of engines and the shout of 
workmen — small as ants from this stern eminence — 
seem puny in that bleak excavation. Even the sev- 
enty-five ton shaft of granite, which the immense 
derrick hoists clumsily into the air, looks infinites- 
imal in the hollowed and stark expanse. 

There are more than six hundred acres of quarry land, 
finishing, cutting and polishing sheds in Rockport; 
there are wharves and sloops and schooners and barges 
and tow boats and lighters to assist in carrying away 
the vast output; there are about a thousand men 
working in these blank airy pits, and yet in spite of all 
this activity there is a strange silence in the air. 
When one has stripped the living verdure from the 
breast of nature, the stiff and bloodless realm which is 
exposed to view possesses qualities as different from 
those of the friendly rocks and trees of the earth as 
the bones of a skeleton from the yielding curves and 
breathing pores of the human frame. One stands in 
silence before a granite quarry! 

Across the fields of Rockport — against the sky — 
against the sea — there by the side of the road, and 
here by the turn of the wood, everywhere are evidences 
of quarries — being worked, or long since deserted. 
Here is a flooded one. The workmen cut too deep, 

103 




There are more than six hundred acres of quarry land, finishing, cutting and 

pohshing sheds in Rockport : there are wharves and sloopes and 

tow boats to assist in carrying away the vast output. 



ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT 

and now the water, clear as air and bitterly deep, 
lies forever in its changeless prison. There is some- 
thing inexpressibly sombre about this immutable, 
sharp-cornered pool with rough bushes fringing the 
harsh edge where it meets the green of the pastures. 
One cannot help but wondering whether this majestic 
mass of stone — helpless under the machinations of 
man, being dumbly hacked and hewed into a million 
paving blocks — did not feel an inarticluate relief that 
its grandeur had been spared, when, silently and 
irresistibly, the water came ebbing in and drove the 
men and their machinery out. 

Many reflections pass before ones fancy here in 
this little sea bound town, for Rockport has a pathetic 
history. Sandy Bay Harbor, passed by seventy thous- 
and vessels annually and on the route of practically 
all the ships that ply between Maine and the Pro- 
vinces and Boston, is never ice bound and has excellent 
holding ground. There are no bars or intricate 
channels, as in Boston and Gloucester harbors: if the 
ocean liners should come in here they could save the 
time of the trip on to Boston or New York and could 
dock easily in the deep water. Why not, therefore, 
make this convenient refuge the transatlantic termin- 
us, into which the great vessels should steam, and out 

105 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

of which should spread a network of railroads 
carrying passengers and freight all over the coun- 
try ? 

This was the idea which fixed itself close to Rock- 
port's heart. As far back as 1835 a petition was pre- 
sented to the Government begging for a survey. It 
was sixty years before the Government took steps in 
the matter, and then, in 1885 after some discreet 
prodding, it commenced work on the five million dollar 
breakwater. Rockport, after her half century of pa- 
tient waiting, blossomed forth into brilliant expec- 
tation and tremendous effort. Railroads, wharves, 
and piers were planned; the first transatlantic cable 
was brought in here; the little Cape Ann town pic- 
tured itself as a port of international significance. 
And then the appropriations began to dribble off; 
the interest began to fiag. Now after thirty years, 
the appropriations have stopped altogether and the 
breakwater is only one third done. People smile at 
Rockport. How ridiculous for a little village to flour- 
ish such grandiloquent ambition! What if the break- 
water were built and did make the harbor safe? Who 
would want to start, or stop, from such an inaccessi- 
ble place ? The vision faded, as visions do, and only 
the unfinished breakwater, a painful reminder of a 

106 



ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT 

period of high hope and a terrible menace to navi- 
gation — stretches for five thousand feet. 

A few men still cherish the hope of completing it 
and vindicating Rockport's claim of a harbor wider 
than any other port on our coast and larger than 
Plymouth and Portland in England and almost as 
large as Cherbourg in France. Pamphlets are still 
circulated and petitions sent upon the languid round, 
but the world has lost interest. Rockport reminds 
one of some impetuous lad, confident of his great 
message, who sets forth to carry the lamp of know- 
ledge through the darkness of the world. He works 
with the fierceness of youth and the fervor of assurance, 
until, at middle age, neglected and poor, his message 
ignored, he turns himself silently to the hack work by 
which he must earn his daily bread. Thus the little vil- 
lage which was to have been the great transatlantic 
terminus no longer permits itself to float out on the 
golden dream of wharves and piers that would wel- 
come the comm^erce of the world, and railroads which 
would thread their way across the length and breadth 
of the continent. Grave in its lesson of disillusion- 
ment it turns resolutely and unremittingly to its toil 
in the granite quarries of its native fields. 



107 




CHAPTER XII 



IN AN ANNISQUAM GARDEN 



It is morning — it is springtime — in Annisquam! 
Through the frame of a gray-barked pergola, scantily 
veiled by a faintly budding creeper, deepens a picture : 
a slope of green turf, a tumbling stone wall with a 
clump of rough shrubbery in the crook of its arm, 
the pleasant roof and white chimneys of a house half 
way down the cliff, and far, far below the blue and 
opalescent calm of Ipswich Bay. To the West 
across the water, swell the white irregular sand dunes 
of Essex: dark moors lie like the shadows of clouds 



108 



ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT 

upon their shifting steeps. To the North and to the 
East the sky vault arches in a vast low sweep above 
the watery plain. There is a mystical expectancy 
in the intense tranquility of the sea and the celestial 
lavender of the heavens. We hold our breath lest 
the radiance be stirred. 

Where are there other gardens like these seaside 
gardens of Annisquam? Where else may the wanderer 
push his unmolested way through swinging gates, 
across front yards and back yards, half grass and half 
boulder, between gaps of stone walls, across a narrow, 
dusty road, under a wisteria-hung arbor, along a dim 
tangle of little paths that twist and turn and lead at 
last into secret shy inclosures where a bird bath or a 
weatherstained marble sundial stands half sunken in 
the green grass? Somewhere — somewhere — a vague 
vision forms and fades. What do these crudely 
hewn stepping stones beneath our feet, this strip of 
narrow verdure on each side, bordered — not too 
straightly — by narrow beds, guarded by tall ever- 
greens and walled in by a leisurely hedge — what do 
they suggest? This thin parterre of Lombardy popu- 
lars standing between us and the dazzling blue of sea 
and sky; these violets clinging close to the shaggy 
rocks and the pale tan mushrooms that glimmer in 

109 




A slope of green turf, the pleasant roof and white chimneys of a house 
haK way down the cliff, and, far below, the blue and 
opalescent calm of Ipswich Bay. 



ANNISQUAM GARDENS 

the grass — what other place and clime do they recall? 
Capri! Capri! The Mediterranean luminousness of 
the bay: the graceful outline of a marble bench which 
stood in another garden where perhaps some buried 
Caesar bled, and where poets have tenderly gathered 
the hyacinths that dropped from a once lovely head — 
bring back waves of memory, haunting and fugitive. 

Only here there is none of the subtle decadence 
of that distant and beguiling spot. The clean Cape 
Ann air is not too heavily scented or too warmly 
luxurious. The remembrance of those wan exotic 
exiles of that other garden spot pales before the reality 
of these brisk American girls in trim white, with 
buoyant step, and these men with keen faces and 
unjaded hearts. Here is the charm of the Bay of 
Naples without its voluptuousness: its crystalline 
color without its too tropical bloom. Annisquam 
possesses the cool virginity of a country that is still 
young: the delicate aloofness that hangs like a silver 
mist about an untouched maid. 

Cottages are scattered with happy informality 
along shore and cliff and cove. There is nothing 
stately, nothing pretentious about the half casual 
pergolas and little plots of flowers. Here, where a few 
gray steps straggle up from one garden to another, 

111 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

two gray amphorae stand in drowsy dignity, and be- 
fore us in a half frame of rustic post and unfolding 
Virginia creeper hangs a foreground of sea, a back- 
ground of sky, separated only by the white line of 
Essex sand. The picture sweeps out beyond the 
confines of its frame: out — out — to East — to West, 
over our heads and under our feet — we are in the 
pearly center of a blue and dreaming sphere. The 
picture is more than a picture.;, it is a revelation to be 
mirrored forever on the soul. 

The wholesome smell of fresh cut grass: the flash 
of a vireo : the hushed rhythm of the waves upon the 
Lighthouse Beach: lilacs purpling and apple trees 
flowering white — no we are not in Capri, but on the 
high shore of Cape Ann. It is morning — it is spring- 
time — in Annisquam! 



112 




CHAPTER XIII 



ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH 



The main street sparsely lined with small un- 
feverish shops, circumspect houses and neat low 
buildings, curves around a corner, climbs at leis- 
ure up an irregular New England hill, and then 
stops, as if to draw a contemplative breath, at 
the foot of the Green. It is not merely the for- 
mation of the town which brings us to the foot 
of the Green and to the base of that gray rocky 
ledge upon which perches with gentle and som- 
bre dominance the First Church. It is more than 
topography, it is more than history; it is romance 
and sentiment. For this Green, with the smooth 
pretty patches of grass at the intersection of the cross 
roads, bearing the ancient monuments and still more 
ancient cannon, and the abrupt old crag which has 



113 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

carried upon its crest a church for nearly three hun- 
dred years, comprise the symbolic center of the town. 
It is impossible to glance even casually over the 
history of Ipswich without being impressed by its 
ecclesiasticism: indeed the history of the town seems 
sometimes hardly more than the history of the church, 
for all other developments — social, political and in- 
dustrial — flowed to and from this central motive 
during its formative years. The old days when the 
preacher was timed by an hour glass, and his salary 
shortened in proportion to the shortening of the dis- 
course: of deacons and tithing men: of men seated on 
one side of the center aisle and women on the other, 
and muskets stacked outside the door: the old days 
when praying, voting, publishing of marriages, notices 
of town interest, requests for prayer and expressions 
of thanksgiving were all carried on in the single build- 
ing which was town house and meeting house in one: 
the old days when ministers in bands and gowns, 
judges in scarlet, prisoners in cuffs and chains and 
people in Sunday clothes or weekday ones entered 
and departed in pursuit of their various business — 
these days which held the essence of the life of the 
community waxed and waned on this very spot which 
still stands — the self same outline of half bare, half 



114 



ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH 

grass grown crag against the temperate sky, sustain- 
ing upon its summit the 'Tirst Church." 

Of course it is not really the first church. That 
was built about a year after John Winthrop and his 
dozen companions settled here in 1633. Agawam, it 
was called, and the name may still be seen on various 
buildings. The Indians sold the place for twenty 
pounds, and, having struck this advantageous bargain, 
the Englishmen promptly proceeded to build a place 
to worship. It was a rough affair and about ten 
years later was sold for fifty shillings, and new one 
erected. The town records are scrupulously exact as 
regards these details. They tell us that Edmund 
Gardner took care of the first building and ''covenated 
to keep it water tight as well as warm and took his 
pay in summer wheat." The second meeting house 
was more pretentious. It was square with a turret 
in the center, and windows in leaden sashes, and when 
it was enlarged, and the bell donated to the school 
house, fifty-three citizens empowered John Appleton, 
a merchant, to buy a larger one in London, and their 
names are inscribed upon the town books to this day. 
The third church, built about fifty years later, was 
''banked with stone and gravill" from the old fort 
on the Green, for the community was acquiring a 

115 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

sense of security and there was no longer a need for a 
gari*ison house. In 1749, still another meeting house 
was raised upon this spot — a spacious new one with 
a needle spire and double doors — with bobbined pews 
and a sounding board. This was used until a century 
ago when the present building was decided upon — 
a brave little meeting house, maintaining the ancient 
traditions in excellent spirit and holding its spire 
steady and high, visible for miles around. 

There is hardly a foot of this Green but recalls the 
past. Where the monument now stands in modest 
aloofness was once enacted the homely custom of 
collecting the hogs in the morning so that Abraham 
War and Goodman Symond might drive them to the 
Commons. At sunrise Daniel Bosworth blew his 
horn and the village cows were gathered in similar 
fashion and were thence conducted to the public 
pasture lands, outside the town limits — evidence that 
Ipswich even at that early date had grasped the ad- 
vantage of some of the features of communism. On 
the South East corner of the Green was the town 
pound, where those animals which were not placed 
under Daniel Bosworth's chaperonage were impaled. 

There was a watch house on the south side of the 
First Church, ten feet square, and bearing the im- 

116 



ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH 

pressive name of 'The Old Meeting House Fort." 
This was built as a defence against the Indians, and 
the town records state with clearness that every male 
adult over eighteen, of every family, including ''sons, 
servants and sojourners" was liable to watch house 
duty. Some one was obliged to be there every 
moment, both to guard the small stock of ammunition 
and to keep an eye out for the prowling Indians, who, 
however, were a very peaceable lot— so peaceable, in 
fact, that no occasion for the fort ever arose, and in 
1702 it was voted that the rocks should be sold, and 
the proceeds used toward buying a town clock. As 
they had a sundial, and as the sexton, Simon Pindar, 
was instructed to ring the church bell every morning 
at five, the good people of Ipswich had every oppor- 
tunity to know and improve each shining hour. 

Although the settlement was left in peace it did not 
relax its vigorous standards. There was no pressure 
from without, but the stern dictates from within 
never faltered. No town offices were given to any 
but church members. A man could not be a hog 
reeve until he had experienced a change of heart: 
fence viewers had to be in good and regular standing, 
and the town crier must be sound on the question of 
original sin. Today as one surveys the tranquil ham- 

117 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

let, unstirred by the stampede of progress, it is not 
difficult to understand the pure simplicity of two 
centuries ago. Many fine old houses still stand in 
dignified sobriety, expressions now and then of self 
respecting inhabitants : the same wide pleasant streets^ 
elm shaded, trail, diverge, meet, cross and separate 
in the old leisurely way: the same lovely hills still 
hold the village in their cup, and the same river winds 
slowly under the bridges. Yes, it is easy to recon- 
struct the Ispwich of long ago, for the Ipswich of 
today retains much of its lingering charm. 

Should you make the easy ascent to the Town Hill 
and look South you will see the soft hills in an irre- 
gular semi-circle to your right, with the village safely 
tucked into the valleys, the river winding from the 
sea, turning the wheels of the great hosiery mills 
which not only bring Ipswich commerce, but bring 
her, too, the very modern problems of immigration; 
for the mills are filled with Greeks and Armenians 
and Poles, with their own settlements on the other 
side of town, their own standards of living, their own 
forms of worship and their own ideas of recreation. 
The river which one can see so clearly from here is 
salt at high tide up to t'he point where it goes under 
the Choate Bridge — the first stone arch bridge built in 

118 



ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH 

this country. The eye leaves the village, the mills and 
the river and sweeps out to sea, the white of the sand 
mingling with the gray of the marsh hay and the 
green of the pastures, as the rhythmic beat of the 
ocean mingles with the sound of the wind; to Ipswich 
Lighthouse shining white in the sun; to Little Neck, 
quite ridiculously rounded and neatly dotted with 
dwellings that look as uniform as those in a child's 
cardboard village from this distance, and to the bar 
beyond where the legend of Harry Main still vi- 
brates with the vibrations of the surf. He was a 
pirate and a smuggler and, worse yet, a ship wrecker, 
and used to build fires on the sand to decoy the vessels 
in among the breakers. But his sins, though pictur- 
esque, were damnable, so Harry Main was damned, 
and at his death was chained to Ipswich bar to coil 
for ever and ever a rope of sand. When the cable 
broke with the dash of the waves, his yells of fury 
could be heard for miles around. We can hear them 
today when the wind is still, and doubtless mothers 
who have not learned the new psychology still try to 
terrifj' their children into obedience by threatening 
them with the rage of Harry Main, as their mothers 
threatened them. The eye sweeps further. The 
distant roofs of some of the summer cottages on the 

119 



ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH 

dunes are visible: Plum Island, the inspiration of 
much that is tuneful in the verse of this section of the 
country, stretches gray and white and green to the 
left. One can see from Cape Ann to the dim Isle of 
Shoals on a clear day, and the conformation of the 
shore curiously suggests Dorsetshire. That bar on 
which the surf is foaming will always be a thorn in the 
side of remembrance, for without it Ipswich might 
have had the prestige of Salem as a shipping port, 
and might even — so earnest antiquarians insist — 
have been the capital of Massachusetts.* 

One cannot appreciate the beach road — the Argilla 
j^Qad — from here: it is best to take a carriage. The 
South Congregational Church and the Common are 
at the other end of town — a handsome pillared build- 
ing and a handsome wide common, and the road 
which winds from here to the summer settlement is 
handsome, too. For summer people are coming to 
Ipswich now, and the big old farm houses and the 
little ones are being remodeled, sometimes with bad 
taste but generally with good, to meet the new de- 
mands. There are cottages quite simply enlarged by 
a veranda and a dormer or two: there are mansions 
with two chimneys and gambreled roofs which needed 
no enlargement but only a fresh coat of white paint, 

*A delightfully appropriate spot to turn to Morgan's well known lines on 
Ipswich. Page 189. 

121 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

and there are new houses, half hidden by the woods or 
set boldly out upon the plains. A Boston archi- 
tect has even built a windmill, closely following the 
hexagonal outlines of those quaint specimens occasion- 
ally seen on Cape Cod. These same summer resi- 
dents have planted Lombardy poplars beside the 
winding road from town, and the long distances 
between the dwellings is pleasantly broken by the 
thin and graceful shade. One must not leave this 
section of Ipswich without stopping to stare at the 
great new estate of a Chicago millionaire, conspicuous 
upon a hill overlooking the sea. It stretches out in 
admirable proportions, with its many rooms and 
gardens, its stables and servants quarters and its 
swimming pool — a far cry indeed from the day 
when even the best houses were two stories high. 
In those days the large white oak timbers 
showed inside the finished rooms, and the windows 
were three feet long and two feet wide, with little 
three-inch diamond panes set in lead. They opened 
out, either in halves or in a solid piece. The doors 
of the wealthy had diagrams marked upon them set 
in lead lines with brass nails driven at the points of the 
angles. Lime was unknown: the walls were daubed 
with clay mixed with straw, or plastered with a sort of 

122 



ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH 

lime made from clam shells. Whitewash took the 
place of paper until the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, and paint was little used. The walls were 
of brick laid on the inner partition, covered with clay, 
which was in turn covered with what were called 
clayboards, and from which our clapboards derived 
their name. The better houses were shingled, but the 
cottages were thatched until almost 1700. And where 
these primitive homes once stood, one may stand and 
gaze upon a complete example of the luxurious and 
the beautiful — a palace with lights and warm water, 
with shining floors and easily moving windows: with 
servitors and automobiles and high bred horses. 
Thus the cycle of years revolves, and by its revolution 
cuts the wake of change. 

On the way back to town one repasses Heartbreak 
Hill, the most romantically named of eminences. 
Here it was that an Indian girl, deserted by a white 
sailor, used to climb and scan the ocean to see if a 
returning sail brought also a returning lover. But 
the dark eyes looked out through their tears in vain. 
He never came back, although she daily trudged the 
path to the top of the hill to search the wide horizon. 
She died, at last — slipping another bead upon the 
long chain of romance — and poets have written 

123 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

about her ever since, the hill still bears a name in 
memory of her, and lovers climb in the springtime to 
sit upon the ledge where she used to stand, and pledge 
their faith.* 

The legends, which draw a shining ring about the 
whole North Shore, cluster thickly here. At the 
Green they will show you the very spot where 
the Devil, enraged, disgusted or alarmed — it does 
not specify — at hearing Whitefield thunder out his 
terrible sermon to a vast outdoor audience, leaped 
down from the church roof where he had been perch- 
ing, and his cloven foot struck deep into the rock. 
You may put your foot in the very print if you are 
not convinced. 

The story brings us back to the Meeting House and 
the Green, as Ipswich stories are apt to do. And, 
having come back, we see half a dozen places of interest 
which we overlooked before. Where the gray Meth- 
odist Church now stands was the Court House, 
where Daniel Webster and Choate and Story made 
their eloquent pleas, and where two town houses 
have lived out their days of usefulness. A few 
doors down is the Seminary, made famous by the 
labors of that ardent educator, Mary Lyons, before 
she went to Mt. Holyoke. It was a fashionable 

Celia Thaxter tells the story more prettily in verse. Page 191. 

124 



ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH 

school sixty-five years ago: one of the very first to 
offer serious and scholarly courses to young ladies, 
whose parents hithertofore had considered it quite 
sufficient for them to lisp a little French, paint velvet 
and tinkle on the piano. Many of the present in- 
habitants of Ipswich remember the Seminary in 
its halycon days, when pupils came from Canada, 
from the middle west and the south to attend, and 
the most exclusive families in town felt honored to re- 
ceive them as boarders. If their childish impression 
of a most amazingly modern place still lingers, to us 
the curriculum of those days sounds quite whimsically 
the reverse. What Female Seminary — if we had 
Female Seminaries in the twentieth century — would 
announce "The Analogy of Natural and Revealed 
Religion to the Constutitional Course of Nature" and 
'The Evidences of Christianity" and "Intellectual 
Philosophy" among its prescribed courses? And 
what Female Seminary, fashionable or not, could state 
today with truthfulness that its weekly price of board, 
including lights and washing, would be $1.75? How- 
ever, in its day this was one of the most highly res- 
pected institutions in the country, where Lucy Lar- 
com and Mary Lyons taught with zeal, and which 
many distinguished women, including Gail Hamilton 

125 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

and Mrs. James G. Blaine, have been proud to call 
their Alma Mater. 

Just above the seminary was the home of Elizabeth 
Brown, who made black bobbin lace for a living, 
and who combined religion and comfort so ingeniously 
that she deserves commemoration. On cold Sundays 
it was her wont to carry a tin foot stove to church, 
filled with turf coals. She buried two potatoes in it, 
and while Mr. Frisbie preached his long and wintry 
sermon, the turfs accomplished the two fold purpose 
of baking the potatoes and keeping her feet warm. 
In the intermission between the morning and after- 
noon services, Elizabeth Brown placidly extracted 
her potatoes, ate them at leisure and was ready for the 
next session. The site where Aaron Cogswell found 
the whipping post and pillory which were once the 
integral part of every well ordered New England 
community, is marked by the elms which he planted — 
a gentler monument to history than those grim relics. 
Not far beyond is the place where Anthony Potter 
lived, he whose wife was fined for wearing a silk bonnet 
to church. At the bottom of the hill is the tavern 
where Washington and Lafayette once stayed. 

Thus the half dreaming town of Ipswich still 
dreams on, for the mills and their employees are quite 

126 



ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH 

removed from this drowsy center of the past. The 
ancient houses standing close to the old roads, seem 
to gather to themselves a sort of personality. This 
one on High Street, near the home of Simon Brad- 
street, once governor of Massachusetts and husband 
of Ann Dudley, the first American poetess — has a 
thin high shouldered look, suggestive of the meagre 
angularity we associate with New England spinsters. 
But it holds itself erect nevertheless, scorning to sag 
beneath its weight of years or lose one jot or title of 
its inflexibility. That prim gray painted one across 
the street reminds us of a pious Deaconess who hy- 
pocritically conceals her age beneath a false gray 
front. And surely, that demure white cottage 
is an old lady who is content to be a grand- 
mother and does not blush to be dainty. There 
is quite a different atmosphere about Ye Rogers 
Manse, now an Inn, but still retaining its old 
time aristocracy. Like a well groomed woman of the 
world in its gleaming white and dark green, it is all 
the more impressive for its decades of experience. 
The comfortable square buildings at the corner re- 
mind one irresistibly of good natured old women who 
have lost both the slimness of youth and the neat 
contours of maturity, and now sprawl out untidily in 

127 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

every direction. They were always rather common, 
of course, but substantial and hospitable, and there 
is something jolly about their shabby outlines. As 
we walk the quiet streets, we feel as if we were in a 
congregation of old ladies, fashionable or dowdy, 
down at the heel or smartly remodeled, but undeniably 
old ladies. The antique shops, the summer people 
and the Historical Society have claimed some of 
them — reclaimed in the last instance as the old 
Whipple House, built before 1638 and now the head- 
quarters of a progressive Historical Society, testifies. 
This weather-beaten landmark, the first of Ipswich's 
historical objects to catch the eye of the passing or 
alighting tourist, and containing a museum worth a 
thoughtful survey, is the patriarch of that congrega- 
tion of venerable dames, which we may picture as 
coming to life again, sedately going to church and 
discussing with discreet cheerfulness whether or not 
one might attain to sanctification and yet be 
damned, whether immersion here will save from fire 
hereafter, and whether God made Hell when He 
made the rest of the Universe. 

For the old Ipswich was a godly Ipswich: a theo- 
logical, sternly orthodox community. No lure of 
meadows in spring time, no beckoning of the river or 

128 



ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWiCH 

call of the sea turned their faces away from the Church 
founded literally upon a rock, worshipped in, married 
in and buried from, and placed with prayerful solem- 
nity in the high center of the town. 



129 




CHAPTER XIV 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 



There are certain personalities which seem as char- 
acteristic of the soil from which they sprung as do 
native fruit and flowers. And there are certain 
regions which have been so enshrined in the life and 
art of a poet or painter that always afterwards they 
bear the impress of that poet or painter. One 
cannot pass through that fairest of all the New 
England country — Essex County, along the banks 
of the Merrimac — without a permeating realization 
of what this lovely and yet virile scenery might 
mean in the development of a sensitive nature. 
And if the beauty of Kenoza Lake and the sweet, 



130 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 

strong benediction of Ayers and Job's Hills found a 
calm reflection in the life of their most cherished 
child, he in his turn repaid them by impressing upon 
them forever the high and tranquil interpretation of 
his verse and of his career. 

There are few journey ings in all New England that 
will bring one more deep and quiet pleasure than a 
day spent in meditative pilgrimage through what is 
fondly called the Whittier Land. For it is not only 
the abstract beauty of meadow, sky and upland that 
is commemorated in the words which have made their 
writer dear to many hearts, but the fact that his 
picturing was so accurate that even the stranger re- 
cognizes today, and sees with a thrill of familiarity 
the "gap in the old wall," ''the stepping stones in the 
shallow brook" — "the hills of Gold and Silver 
Rimming round the little town." 

No detail was too insignificant, no trifle too homely 
to be caught in the photographic mirror of a mind 
which was in complete harmony with its environment. 
What Burns did for the banks and braes of Ayr and 
Doon, the Quaker poet has done for the wooded hills 
of this "rich and many watered land," and those 
who have a day to let slip like a smooth chain 
through fingers, tired from the feverish turning of 

131 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

leaves, cranking of machines and the handling of 
money and all the paraphernalia of modern life can 
not do better then to fare forth to the birthplace of 
one whose spirit even more than his poetry is one of 
the purest products and one of the finest heritages of 
Massachusetts. 

Haverhill is a busy modern city, and although there 
are places in it connected with the early days of 
Whittier, such as the Academy from which he grad- 
uated, yet it is not here that we find his true habitat. 

Three miles from the city hall in what is called the 
East Parish of Haverhill is the birthplace — three miles 
of curving road with a trolley every half hour or so — 
three miles of woodland and hills with contours as 
soft as any Italian mountain, and yet with the singular 
strength which distinguishes the New World from 
the old. What is it that makes this charming country 
with its highlands and lowlands, its lakes and streams 
not enervating but crisply, beautifully fair? Is it the 
sturdiness of the evergreens, the rough sides of the 
boulders, the not too languid ripple of the water? 
As we take the pleasant road toward East Haverhill 
we understand how the forces of Nature molded the 
aspiration and formed the taste of the lad who walked 
here often, his eyes upon the "opulence of hill and 

132 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 

lakes" and his heart musing on the wonders of 
creation. He who would approach the Whittier 
country in a mood of sympathy should not whizz 
through it in an automobile, but walk at leisure and 
at leisure pause to dream. 

The lake on the right is Kenoza, so christened by 
Whittier, and the bright sheet of water and the idyllic 
hills — one of them crowned with a castle more 
suggestive of the romance of Europe than that of 
America — now a public park, have all been caught and 
held in his rhyme. The smaller lake on the left is a 
hundred feet higher than Kenoza and far above most 
of the houses in the city. The valley in which the 
birthplace stands is almost dramatically picturesque. 
The slope is gentle, the splashing brook twists and 
darts in ripples, and the farmhouse through the trees 
gleams white as a farmhouse should. Peace broods 
over the spot on dreaming wings, and all the visitors 
that come cannot disturb her deep tranquility. 

The New England farmhouse has become a phrase 
in our vocabularies connoting the simplicity that is 
comely and the plainness that is refreshing. The 
square house in which Whittier was born in 1807 
was built by his great grandfather in 1688, and with 
the lilacs blooming by the front door, the white well- 

133 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

sweep near, the old fashioned garden, the wall of 
native stone, and the screen of maple, walnut, pine 
and ash trees, it is as delightfully and wholesomely 
typical as the imagination could desire. The barn 
is across the street, longer than it was in the poet's 
day, but the same distance from the house that it 
was when the boys tunnelled their way through it to 
the snow drifts. 

"Our buskins on our feet we drew; 
With mittened hands and caps drawn low, 
To guard our ndcks and ears from snow. 
We cut the solid whiteness through. 
And where the drift was deepest, made 
A tunnel, walled and overlaid 
With dazzling crystal." 

And through this they 

" reached the barn with merry din. 

And roused the prisoned brutes within." 

One enters the house by a side door, through a 
small entry into a long, old fashioned kitchen, low 
ceilinged, rough beamed, a braided mat on the wide 
boarded floor before the huge fireplace; straight 
backed chairs beside the well scrubbed table, a spin- 
ning wheel and an ancient desk — one which belonged 

134 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 

to Whittier's great grandfather and upon which he 
scribbled his first childish verses — in a corner by a 
square paned window. This is the room made 
memorable by ''Snowbound." Here was piled 

"The oaken log, green, huge and thick. 
And on its top the stout back stick; 
The knotty forestick laid apart, 
And filled between with curious art 
The ragged brush; then hovering near, 
We watched the first red blaze appear, 
Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam. 
On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, 
Until the rude, old fashioned room 
Burst flower-like into rosy bloom." 

The generous well worn hearth about which the 
family gathered, the bricks where simmered the mug 
of cider and where "the apples sputtered in a row," 
even the plump bull's eye watch hanging over the 
mantel are all here; and as we survey this clean and 
decorous place with its staunch timbers and decent 
furnishings, there forms before our eyes a picture of 
the simplicity and industry of those days of which 
such a room was the background, and the honest 
ideals and unaffected tastes of which it was the cradle. 
There is something inexplicably touching in the 

135 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 

scrupulous exactness with which this room has been 
preserved, and it has produced a hushed air of ex- 
pectation, as if the man who lived there for twenty- 
nine years might be coming in any moment, and would 
hang up his coat on a nail by the entry door, pull out 
one of the wooden bottomed chairs toward the fire- 
place, and change his boots, country fashion. There 
even stand a pair of his shoes on the hearth, unfashion- 
able, solidly made, typical of the place and of the 
rustic boy who wore them. * 

In a little room at the western end of the kitchen; up 
two steps higher than the kitchen, is the small cabin- 
like chamber — ''Mother's Room." Here again is that 
touching preservation of detail which makes us sensi- 
ble of an atmosphere which is neither past nor present, 
but curiously embalmed between. For although upon 
the four-post bed there are still spread the sheets and 
blankets woven bj^ Whittier's mother, some of them 
bearing her maiden name, although the bureau is the 
self same piece which has stood here for so many gen- 
erations, and the little shaving glass is that which was 
used by Whittier throughout his life both here and at 
Amesbury — although the small chamber still retains 
the Quaker artlessness of arrangement, yet we do not 
feel the pulse of life. Perhaps it is the fragments of 

*The visitor who wishes to recall some of the best of Snowbound will 
find it on page 194. 

137 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

baby clothes, which once were worn by Whittier's 
father and then were thriftily passed on to his son and 
are now carefully pressed beneath glass and hanging 
on the wall, which infuse something of the air of a 
museum to the apartment. A sense of solemnity 
gathers within us as we stand in the midst of these 
things expressive of a deeply established mode of life, 
while that life itself has vanished. 

In the room where Whittier was born we notice the 
quaintly modest pieces of furniture which were part 
of his mother's bridal outfit. The unpretentious little 
mahogany card table, the demure red painted chest, 
the cabinets containing intimate mementos of the 
family. Brass andirons, candle sticks and whale oil 
lamps still shine as in the day of the energetic house- 
keeper, and on the shelves the books which Whittier 
handled as a boy stand where they stood then. It is 
all very neat, very substantial, almost amusingly free 
from ornamentation of any kind — a fitting environ- 
ment indeed for the youth of the man to whom there 
was no beauty so excellent as moral beauty, no lure so 
strong as the beckoning of duty. There are several 
portraits of him here, interesting as portraits of inter- 
esting people must be in showing the gradual changes 
which years work upon them. There is something al- 

138 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 

most psychic in the deep eyes of the young man, some- 
thing of disappointment in the curve of the mobile 
mouth. The serene face of the old man has lost the 
shadow of melancholy. The eyes have faced the suc- 
cesses and defeats of his life and are looking forward 
without apprehension toward the experiences of the 
life which is to come. 

There are any number of places near here which will 
be of significance in proportion to one's knowledge of 
the poet's life and work. At the foot of the western hill 
is a small lot inclosed by a stone wall which was the 
earliest burying ground of the family. The two houses 
where the boy went to school still remain, and on the 
site of the house in ' 'School Days" the brown sumachs 
grow and the blackberry vines are creeping. The 
grave of the "Countess" — that romantic and pathetic 
exile — is visited by hundreds every year, and Rocks 
village still fits the description it received so long ago : 

'*Over the wooded northern ridge, 

Between its houses brown, 
To the dark tunnel of the bridge 

The street comes straggling down. 
You catch a glimpse through birch and pine 

Of gable roof and porch. 
The tavern with its swinging sign. 

The sharp horn of the church." 

139 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

On the Country Bridge road on the way to Rocks 
village is the old Peaslee, or Garrison, house, the home 
of Whittier's great grandmother — the one who brought 
Quakerism into the family. It was built with bricks 
brought from England before 1675, and in the time of 
King Phillip's war was used as a refugee shelter, as the 
port-holes in its thick sides and the compartments in 
the cellar still testify. Its walls are of white oak, sixteen 
inches thick, and the bricks are fastened with iron bolts. 
There is a touch of romance about it, with its deep win- 
dow seats and closets and attics. Tradition has it that 
the Quakers used to hold their quarterly meetings here, 
as they were not allowed to worship in Haverhill. All 
the nine miles from here to Amesbury have been often 
travelled by the poet, — as a little boy when he was 
driven chattering with the cold to the meeting house 
on Po Hill — as a lad when he traversed these miles on 
foot, and as man when he reproduced the Newbury 
hills, the ghmpses of Ipswich Bay and the southern 
ranges of the New Hampshire Mountains, going back 
in his memory over the well known road. 

Amesbury, where the last fifty -six years of his life were 
spent, has not the charm of Haverhill, and neither has 
the house where he lived the direct appeal of his birth- 
place. It is an ordinary sort of building, interesting 

140 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 

only because of many mementos which are on exhi- 
bition within. Here is a cane made from the wood of 
his office in Philadelphia which was burned by a pro- 
slavery mob in 1858, and of all the canes given him — 
some of them valuable and one of them made from the 
wood of the house where Barbara Freitchie lived — this 
was the only one he ever carried. In the drawer of the 
desk on which "Snowbound" was written is an album 
presented him on his eightieth birthday. It contains the 
autographs of every member of the United States Sen- 
ate and the House of Representatives, the Supreme 
Court of the United States, the Governor, Ex-Gover- 
nor and the Supreme Court of Massachusetts and 
many other distinguished names. One likes to notice 
that not one single Southern Congressman or Senator 
failed to sign his name to a tribute designed for the 
most ardent of abolitionists. In what he called his 
"Garden Room" practically nothing has been altered. 
The portraits of his friends hang here — Garrison, Thom- 
as Starr King, Emerson, Longfellow, Sturge, Chinese 
Gordon and others, and the books he placed there still 
stand upon their accustomed shelves. The carpet he 
selected, the chair he sat in, the stove, the various 
pieces of furniture, are all as he last saw them. The 
house is not elegant — hardly attractive. The zeal for 

141 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

righteousness which so often goes hand in hand with 
indifference to external delights is quite apparent in the 
commonplace accessories with which the Quaker bard 
surrounded himself. 

In the town of Amesbury are many places made 
famous by the writings of one who was known from 
ocean to ocean in his day. 'The Captain's Well" is 
down the road half a mile; if you read the poem by 
that name you will learn how Captain Valentine Bagley 
who had been shipwrecked had vowed that if he were 
ever rescued from the miseries of hunger and thirst 
that he would dig a well by the roadside so that all 
thirsty passersby might quench their thirst. The 
story is a true one, and the well stands there to this 
day. The Friends Meeting house — severely unembel- 
lished — is in the other direction, and a silver plate 
marks the seat which the poet usually occupied. 
Salisbury Beach — the scene of *'A Tent on the 
Beach," now covered with cottages, is not far away, 
nor is Pleasant Valley, a favorite walk of Whittier 
and his sister and commemorated in the ''River 
Path." The fountain on Mundy Hill may be visited, 
although the fountain is a ^spring and a willow 
takes the place of the oak mentioned in the verse. 
Whittier Hill,— locally called Whitcher Hill, and 

142 



THE WHITTIER COUNTRY 

named not for John Greenleaf but for his first Amer- 
ican ancestors; the Macy house, built before 1654: by 
Thomas Macy who was driven from town for harbor- 
ing a proscribed Quaker, as told in ''The Exiles" 
stand as they have for many generations. 

The cemetery in which Whittier lies is on the high 
slope of a hill, in the section reserved for the Friends. 
A low hedge of Arbor Vitae surrounds the family lot, 
and here under plain little white headstones — all pre- 
cisely alike except for the poet's which is a trifle larger 
— lies every member of the family mentioned in ''Snow 
bound." Two cedars mark his brother's grave and his, 
and the sun rests cheerfully upon the quiet and united 
family. There is none of that sad and rhapsodic dis- 
hevellment that lingers about the solitary grave of 
Shelley at Rome: none of the impressive pomp which 
stands guardian to the tomb of Tennyson in West- 
minister Abbey. The last resting place of this sincere 
democrat lies in the chaste and tempered sunlight of a 
country hillside, under the wide clouds of the sky he 
loved. In the distance one may see the hills of New- 
buryport, that fine old town against which the last 
ripples of his life, like the ever-widening circles on an 
unruffled surface, broke in gentleness. Newburyport, 
where he often visited in the later years, even yet reflects 

143 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

something of the personality of one who gathered with- 
in himself the most intense expression of what is best 
in the New England character. 

For it is as a personality more than as a poet that 
Whittier will be longest remembered. His verse is 
more valuable as a faithful document of a fair land than 
as literature. His message was of spiritual rather than 
artistic import : and his life more mysterious than his art. 
And is this not true of all who have a spark of the divine 
genius? Only as a human life is in tune with tlie infinite 
is that life beautiful, and only as its work expresses that 
harmony shall that work endure. The words that 
Whittier wrote will be dear to New England hearts for 
many generations, but his life of consecrated idealism, 
of resolute, reverent self sacrifice, passing into the 
stream of all human consciousness and elevating it by 
just as much as it bore within itself of spiritual rather 
than material reality, must — if we believe in the deep- 
er meaning of existence — be of imperishable signifi- 
cance. For a pure soul deepening under the griefs 
and sweetening under the joys of earthly experience 
is the supreme poem of mankind, and that poem, 
humbly and patiently wrought through Whittier' s 
long and useful years of struggle, is written invisibly, 
ineradicably upon these hills forever. 

144 




CHAPTER XV 

CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT 

A serene and ancient town with square white man- 
sions ranged on either side of the long elm shaded 
streets: a town with a drowsy Mall and a placid pond: 
behind it level land, the flat Rowley marshes, the 
peaceful prairies of old Newbury: on one side the 
Merrimac River, and beyond, the quiet sands and 
sea. How still it is! how leisurely! how undis- 
turbed! 

A horse waits at the station without champing: 
the driver strolls across the street and takes the reins 



145 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

loosely in a casual hand. You lean forward from the 
back seat and pop a dozen curious questions, to which 
the drawling answer serves rather as a sedative than 
a stimulant. You are in Newburyport — the end of 
the North Shore — a town which has increased only 
about ten per cent in twenty five years: whose 
history has long since been made, but a history 
of such vigor that the dignified somnolence of today 
must be respected as the slumber of a warrior. 

As you see the people moving without haste, the 
immemorial elms interweaving their mild shade 
across High Street which paces for six miles parallel 
with the river: as you see the big three-story houses 
with their wide halls running from end to end, not 
much altered since the days when their merchants 
and West India captains issued grandly forth from 
them, it is hard to believe that this was once the most 
vital and passionate of New England towns: burning 
British tea in the public square before the Bostonians 
even started on their tea party : refusing to use or pay 
for or touch a British stamp: sending out our first 
privateers which raked in British commerce to the 
tune of many millions: building the first ship that 
ever flew an American flag on the Thames, carrying 
a broomstick on her peak — after Van Tromp's fashion 

146 



CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT 

— to tell how we had swept the seas: mustering the 
first volunteer company of the Revolution and build- 
ing fighting frigates that were the pride of the colonies. 

The history of Newburyport is one of such fervor 
and initiative that it makes mechanical modern war- 
fare seem wan and joyless. The whole town was 
carried up and out on a wave of patriotism that broke 
on shores across the Atlantic. Incredible feats were 
performed. The little sloop ''Wasp" captured thir- 
teen merchantmen in three months, and finally 
engaging four ships in the line went down gloriously, 
with every man at the guns and all her colors flying. 
Captain William Nichols — the famous privateersman 
— capped a most spectacular career by bringing into 
port in three weeks, four prizes, sixty-four prisoners 
and half a million dollars worth of booty. 

Those were vehement days, when in the flush of her 
energy Newburyport produced not only fighters but 
the progenitors of men who have made the United 
States a world power; the Sewall family who occupied 
the judical bench in the supreme court for eighty-four 
years: Theophilus Parsons who helped draft the 
Constitution and drew to his native town Robert 
Treat Paine, Rufus King and John Quincy Adams to 
study law with him. The Lowell family sprang from 

147 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

here, as did the Springs, the Tyngs, the Chases. 
Caleb Cushing, first mayor of the town, attorney 
general of the United States and commissioner to 
China, Nicholas Pike, author of the first American 
arithmetic; William Lloyd Garrison, whose birth- 
place may still be seen; William Wheelright, author 
of the great South American railroad system; Josiah 
Bartlett, one of the signers of the Declaration of 
Independence — the name of her distinguished sons 
is a legion, and many of those names still continue 
on their native heath. 

It is difficult to realize that this uneventful town, 
sleeping under the summer sun or muffled in the winter 
snow, emerged from a history of extraordinary violence. 
They even had earthquakes here in the early days — 
over two hundred of them — with roarings, and flash- 
ings of fire running along the ground, fissures rending the 
rocks, cellars splitting open, chimneys and walls fall- 
ing, floating islands forming, tons of white sand being 
flung out to burn like brimstone, and springs drying up 
and breaking out in a single night. These cataclysms 
were so frequent that the town chronicle mentions 
them quite incidentally, as it might refer to a full 
moon or a flood tide. 

Their religious history was as exciting as their 

148 



CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT 

seismatic. George Whitefield, the magnetic and 
eloquent English revivalist who crossed the ocean 
fourteen times and delivered over eighteen thousand 
sermons, preached more than once in the First Pres- 
byterian Meeting House, now called the Old South 
Church on Federal Street. Dramatic as all his 
advents were, it was on his last visit to the town — 
thirty years to a day from the first— that he was 
the central figure in as impressive a scene as 
can well be imagined. He arrived very tired on 
Saturday night and as he was going upstairs to his 
room the people who had gathered to greet him crowd- 
ed about the foot of the stairway. He stood there 
above them, weary and breathing painfully, his candle 
in his hand. And then he began to speak. He 
addressed them with difiiculty but with intense 
earnestness. They listened, hushed and expectant, 
their faces upturned to his, the candle light illuminat- 
ing his worn countenance. The candle flickered, 
burned out and went into its socket. The great 
evangelist's voice stopped, as a bell that ceases 
ringing. The next morning he was dead. 

The house in which he died, his tomb, the 

bible he used, and the church where he preached 

are preserved to this day.* The church is worth 

♦Whittier has transmitted something of this extraordinary magnetic per- 
sonality into his "Preacher." Page 196. 

149 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

seeing, not only because of its architecture — 
the whispering gallery where the black slaves of 
the sea captains used to sit is equalled only by St. 
Paul's in London: the straight backed pews have been 
here since 1802 and the communion seat and vener- 
able haircloth sofa are worth more in money than the 
original edifice when it was built, and the bell was 
cast in 1802 by Paul Revere and Son — but because 
of its stirring historical associations. Here Whitefield 
preached and is buried: here Arnold's expedition to 
Quebec, officered by the dashing Aaron Burr, marched 
on the Sunday before its departure with drums beat- 
ing and colors flying and stacked its muskets in the 
side aisle while the citizens packed the gallery and 
the stairs: and here the great Revolutionary preacher, 
John Murray, on whose head the British Government 
placed a reward of six hundred guineas, so ex- 
horted a discouraged regiment which was about to 
disband that not one man left the ranks. 

Newburyport lived energetically in those days both 
on land and sea. She sent over sixteen hundred soldiers 
to the Revolution, entertainedWashington and Lafay- 
ette, and when the war was over applied herself with 
equal strenuousness to the ways of peace. She built 
merchantmen and rigged them, and some times more 



150 



CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT 

than ninety ships stood upon the stocks at one time. 
Her commerce was second only to Salem and Boston, 
and her era of magnificence set in. Then it was that 
the young nabob, Nathaniel Tracy, could travel from 
Newburyport to Virginia and sleep every night under 
his own roof: then it was that the magnificent Tristram 
Dalton made his wedding calls in a coach drawn by 
six white horses and lined with white satin attended 
by coachmen, footmen, and four outriders, and that 
old Mr. Marquand, awed by the wealth of his argosies 
that came sailing in and sailing in to port, prayed, 
''Lord, stay Thy hand: Thy servant has enough." 
The band of French refugees, some from San Domingo, 
some from the Barbadoes and some from France 
added their touch of polish to the social life. Tally- 
rand's house stood next to that of Timothy Dexter, 
and it was from Newburyport that Brissot went back 
to France to lose his head on the scaffold of the 
Girondists. 

It is as fascinating as any old ballad to read of the 
patriarchial estate of Tristram Dalton in Newbury- 
port and his summer home four miles away. Wide 
and broad, they attracted distinguished foreign 
guests and men of mark from all over the country. 
Piazzas and dairies and stables and plate and wine 



151 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

cellars — were all fused into instruments of hospi- 
tality by the urbanity of the host. He was elected 
senator to Congress, was sucked into the whirlpool 
of extravagant living in Washington, and everything — 
sumptuous estates and kingly exchequers — were swept 
away, and the gracious lady of the manor who had 
entertained in brocades and lace eked out her meagre 
old age by opening a boarding house in Boston. 
A tragic ending, but one which pulses with the 
throb of romance. 

So does the Indian Hill Farm — of a later date — in 
West Newbury, which after a hundred years remains 
one of the most remarkable estates in New England. 
It was rebuilt into its present shape in 1832 by Ben 
Perley Poore, with stone towers and turrets, ancestral 
portraits and ancient armor, diamond paned windows 
and charming gardens, somewhat after the fashion of 
an English country place, and must have been a won- 
der of the age a century ago. Beside its rooms of 
Indian relics, powder horns, cutlasses, bows and arrows, 
antique pewter ware, old china and innumerable curios, 
it has the additional interest of being partially con- 
structed from some of the most historical buildings in 
Massachusetts, including a staircase from the Tracy 
house in Newburyport, a wainscoting from Governor 

152 



CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT 

Hancock's residence, and a richly ornamented mantel 
from the old Province House in Boston. The Indian 
Hill Farm may still be seen by the curious, honey 
suckle and clematis over its picturesque front door — 
distinctive and odd, but not unattractive in its 
elaboration of detail. 

Another building of immense interest and charm is 
the Spenser Pierce House, often called the Garrison 
House because the powder supply of the town was 
stored in it. Like an English manor in effect, of 
stone, beveled brick and plaster, roomy, deep walled, 
settled into the becoming air of old age, framed by a 
wide lawn and groups of trees and a view of the pass- 
ing river, it is a unique piece of architecture in this 
country. It stands on a side lane in this New Eng- 
land town looking vastly like a bit of Warwickshire. 
It is three storied, its bricks and plaster mellowed 
by time, its arched windows small paned and deep 
set, its heavy oaken door held by hinges two feet 
long. The porch is remarkably handsome, and its 
square tiled, foreign looking floor opens into rooms 
twenty feet square. There is no other house in this 
country like it. It was originally in the form of a 
Greek cross, but has been changed by its various 
owners into a Roman one. But its fundamental dis- 

153 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

tinction and excellence of proportion has preserved 
it from dispoilation. It was probably built in 1860 
by John Spencer, passing into the hands of Daniel 
Pierce, the village blacksmith, by the ceremony of 
turf and twig. It stayed in the Pierce family — from 
whom came one of our presidents — for a hundred 
years or more, and then was bought by Nathaniel 
Tracy, the merchant and privatesman. What tales 
those regal rooms with their chaste panelling could 
tell of the fine furniture and fine folks once lit 
by the flames from the deep fire places! When Cap- 
tain Offin Boardman took it he built the wooden 
addition for his invalid wife : John Pettingell's owner- 
ship was followed by that of Edward Little, in whose 
family it still remains. For all its solidity of archi- 
tecture it has curious gaps in its history and much 
diversity of opinion as to its original purpose — whether 
a fort, a garrison in time of need, or a spacious resi- 
dence. However, there it is — for almost three cen- 
turies a thing of joy. 

The house of Timothy Dexter has happily been 
altered since the days of its erratic owner who succeed- 
ed in bruiting his ridiculous reputation all over New- 
buryport — much to its disgust. For he took a house 
on High Street and converted it into a museum of 

154 



CHAMING OLD NEWBURYPORT 

horrors, turning its yard into a den of carved and 
horrible wooden statues of all sorts and condi- 
tions of celebrities from Napoleon to Jefferson, 
to whom he took off his three cornered hat when- 
ever he passed. Along with his foibles he had 
a knack of making money, and once sent a boat- 
load of warming pans to the West Indies, where 
they obligingly took off their covers and used 
them for ladles in the sugar business. He accepted 
his mock title of Lord Timothy Dexter with com- 
plaisance and lived up to it by investing in a coach 
and four with four outriders, in which entourage he 
once rode to Ipswich goal to serve a short sentence. 
He raised a fish peddler to the position of poet laureate 
of his household, and some of the jingles which that 
fisherman perpetrated still exist. And he wrote a 
book with all the punctuation in the back of it so that 
the readers could ''salt and pepper as they pleased." 
After his death a galfe blew down many of the wooden 
statues, the gingerbread house and its gewgaws fell 
into the hands of factory boarding house keeper, 
and then was purchased by a gentleman who removed 
the disfigurements and left only their gilded eagle on 
the cupola to remind one of the days of its fantastic 
adornment. 

155 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

But Newburyport's halcyon days were shattered 
by a series of catastrophies. The Embargo Act 
crippled her so swiftly and severely that she never 
recovered. Great vessels rotted at the wharves un- 
used, with tar-barrels, derisively called ' 'Madison's 
night caps" inverted over the topmasts to save the 
rigging, while the idle crews hungrily patrolled the 
streets. The first anniversary of the Act was observed 
by flags at half masts, tolling bells, and processions 
in crepe and muffled drums, uttering the now classic 
wish ''that Hell might be boiled down to a half pint 
and Madison forced to drink it." 

Upon the heels of this paralysing stroke came the 
great fire of 1811, destroying sixteen acres in the 
most compact section of the town. All night long 
it raged, the flames stretching in a sheet of fire from 
one square to another, glass melting in the windows, 
animals and people shrieking, birds caught in a 
shower of fury, and priceless houses with their treas- 
ures dissolving forever from mortal view. Many 
families were beggared in that night, business was 
terribly depressed, and the whole town impoverished. 

The War of 1812, when the town suffered a long 
blockade from the enemies' cruisers, again checked 
commerce brutally, but it was the fourth blow, dealt 

156 



CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT 

with the quietness that often marks the supremely 
significant event in community as well as individual 
life, which was the last and fatal one. With the in- 
troduction of railroads and the developments of 
steam power the foreign and coasting trade along 
the Atlantic was gradually concentrated in two or 
three cities. That was all: Newburyport who had 
withstood many slings of arrows of outrageous fortune, 
separated from her mother-ocean and its gifts, weaken- 
ed like some New World Amazonian Atlas. She had 
fought a brilliant fight in war and peace: she had in- 
itiated the first insurance company in this country: 
had taken the first daguerreotype: established the 
first incorporated woolen mill, the first incorporated 
academy, the first female high school: the first re- 
gularly educated physician of New England came 
from here and the first Bishop of Massachusetts. 
She had been the conspicuous home of inventors, 
literary and professional men. But this unspectacu- 
lar turn in the tide of progress drained her like a pain- 
less and insidious disease. Her ship owners and mer- 
chants became spinners and weavers. The golden 
days were over. 

And yet today as the stranger walks up the tran- 
quil streets of the unstirring town he finds her still 

157 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

beautiful. There is a repose and dignity here that 
he has not often met before in all his journeyings. 
High Street maintains itself, handsome and aristo- 
cratic after all its magnificences, vicissitudes, and the 
big square houses, in excellent repair, look out calmly 
and unreproachfully across their well clipped lawns. 

Plum Island — that nine mile stretch of sand dunes, 
beach plum bushes and summer cottages, separated 
from the mainland by marshes threaded by great bow 
knots of silver ribbon at low tide and melting into a 
broad mirror from shore to shore at flood tide — is still 
the loved playground of the community. Few is- 
lands on our coast hold a more constant place in the 
affections. Ever since revolutionary troops were 
stationed here to prevent the landing of soldiers or 
sailors from English vessels, ever since Harriet Pres- 
cott Spofford, Hannah F. Gould, Celia Thaxter and 
others of that gifted coterie wrote so intimately and 
so vividly about those ''low green prairies of the sea'' 
spanned by a mere finger of a bridge, it has been 
cherished with a peculiar fondness. If you are a 
stranger in Newburyport you may miss Plum Island, 
but if you are a visitor there, if only for a day, you 
will surely be taken or driven over to it to picnic on 



158 



CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT 

the yellow sand hills as so many laughing generations 
have picnicked there before you. * 

And finally, before you leave Newburyport, you 
must certainly go down to the lower waterside region 
of Joppa, inhabited, like its distant namesake, by 
fishermen from time immemorial, and still retaining 
something of the piquancy of a seaport with a popu- 
lation that fishes, pilots or acts as watermen. As 
early as 1640, sturgeon were packed and pickled here 
for European trade, and later, mackerel and cod were 
caught and dried upon the fish flakes. The moss 
covered houses, the clam sheds, the irregular street and 
the picturesque congestion remind one of those other 
Lands End communities of Mousehole or Penzance. 
Joppa is dirty. It sprawls without embarrassment in 
the midst of ''a very ancient and fish like smell." 
It is not very important. But it is curiously 
suggestive. The great wharves which once creaked 
under mighty foreign freight have dropped to 
pieces with the ebb and flow of the tide, and the 
impressive East Indiamen and foreign barks and 
brigs that were once familar sights, have vanished 
like their own mirages. The glory of commerce has 
fled from Joppa, but Nature is kinder than man. 



♦I cannot reeiat giving in full Mrs. Spofford'a lovely lines about this 
island of associations. Page 199. 

159 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

No longer may argosies laden with wealth come up to 
the little port, but on the level floor of the wide stream 
shine tints and lustres that break and shimmer as 
prodigally for the oars of a dory as they ever did for 
statelier keels, and the yellow masts and brown shrouds 
of a blistered schooner are reflected in the dock water 
as richly as were the trappings of the barge that once 
carried Washington across to the Salisbury shore. 

Newburyport is quiet alter her years of eagerness. 
Those who judge value by noise will find little here 
to hold their fancy or quicken their sentiment. But 
for those to whom the essense of a place is its spirit, 
this last of the North Shore Towns will always possess 
a special and enduring charm. 



160 



FAMOUS POEMS 

OF THE 

NORTH SHORE 



THE NORTH SHORE 

The beguiling lilt of John White Chadwick's well 
known stanzas gather to themselves a more definite 
appeal when we read them on the North Shore of 
New England where and about which they were 
written. 

BY THE SEASHORE 

The curved strand, 

Of cool gray sand 

Lies like a sickle by the sea; 

The tide is low, 

But soft and slow 

Is creeping higher up the lea. 

The beach-birds fleet, 

With twinkling feet. 

Hurry and scurry to and fro, 

And sip, and chat 

Of this and that 

Which you and I may never know. 

The runlets gay. 

That haste away 

To meet each snowy bosomed crest, 

Enrich the shore 

With fleeting store 

Of art-defying arabesque. 

Each higher wave 

Doth touch and lave 

A million pebbles smooth and bright; 

Straightway they grow 

A beauteous show. 

With hues unknown before bedight. 

High up the beach, 

Far out of reach 

Of common tides that ebb and flow, 

The drift-wood's heap 

Doth record keep 

Of storms that perished long ago. 

163 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

Nor storms alone: 

I hear the moan 

Of voices choked by dashing brine, 

When sunken rock 

Or tempest shock 

Crushed the good vessel's oaken spine. 

Where ends the beach, 

The cliffs upreach 

Their lichen-wrinkled foreheads old; 

And here I rest, 

While all the west 

Grows brighter with the sunset's gold. 

Par out at sea, 

The ships that flee 

Along the dim horizon's line 

Their sails unfold 

Like cloth of gold. 

Transfigured by that light divine. 

A calm more deep, 

As 't were asleep, 

Upon the weary ocean falls; 

So low it sighs, 

Its murmur dies, 

Wfhile shrill the boding cricket calls. 

Peace and rest! 
Upon the breast 

Of God himself I seem to lean. 

No break, no bar 

Of sun or star: 

Just God and I, with naught between. 

Oh, when some day 

In vain I pray 

For days like this to come again, 

1 shall rejoice 

With heart and voice 

That one such day has ever been. 

John White Chadivick. 

164 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 



LYNN 

A poem that should be read on the very spot whi-ch 
inspired it, for it is not only a clear guide but an in- 
spiring one to this section of the New England coast 
line. 

HIGH ROCK 

Overlooking the town of (Lynn, 
So far above that the city's din 
Mingles and blends with the heavy roar 
Of the breakers along the curving shore. 
Scarred and furrowed and glacier-seamed, 
Back in the ages so long ago, 
The boldest philosopher never dreamed 
To count the centuries' ebb and flow, 
Stands a rock with its gray old face 
Eastward, ever turned to the place 
Where first the rim of the sun is seen — 
Whenever the morning sky is bright, — 
Cleaving the glistening, glancing sheen 
Of the sea with disk of insufferable light. 
Down in the earth his roots strike deep; 
Up to his breast the houses creep. 
Climbing e'en to his rugged face, 
Or nestling lovingly at his base. 

Stand on his forehead, bare and brown, 

Send your gaze o'er the roofs of the town, 

Away to the line so faint and dim. 

Where the sky stoops down to the crystal rim 

Of the broad Atlantic whose billows toss, 

Wrestling and weltering and hurrying on 

With awful fury whenever across 

His broad, bright surface with howl and moan, 

The Tempest wheels, with black wing bowed 

To the yielding waters which fly to the cloud, 

Or hurry along with thunderous shocks 

To break on the ragged and riven rocks. 

165 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

When the tide comes in on a sunny day, 
You can see the waves beat back in spray 
From the splintered spurs of Phillips Head, 
Or tripping along with dainty tread, 
As of a million glancing feet 
Shake out the light in a quick retreat, 
Or along the smooth curve of the beach, 
Snowy and curling in long lines reach. 

An Islet anchored and held to land 

By a glistening, foam-fringed ribbon of sand; 

That is Nahant, and that hoary ledge 

To the left is Egg Rock, like a blunted wedge, 

Cleaving the restless ocean's breast. 

And bearing the lighthouse on its crest. 

All these things and a hundred more, 

Hill and meadow and marsh and shore. 

Your eye o'erlooks from the gray bluff's brow; 

And I sometimes wonder what, if now 

The old rock had a voice, 't would say 

Of the countless years it has gazed afar 

Over the sea as it looks to-day; 

Glazed unmoved, though with furrow and scar 

The sculptor ages have wrought his face, 

While centuries came and went apace, 

Just like the ceasless ebb and flow 

Of the restless hurrying tides below. 

Elizabeth F. Merrill. 



166 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 



LYNN 

It would be a loss if the clamor of modern Lynn 
drowned out forever the sound of the Lynn which 
Longfellow so musically remembers. The person- 
ality of a city as well as that of an individual is com- 
posed not only of its present but of its past. The pro- 
gress of twentieth century Lynn is not its only char- 
acteristic: the poetry of generations ago is also an 
integral part. 

THE BELLS OF LYNN 

O Curfew of the setting sun! O Bells of Lynn! 
O requiem of the dying day! O Bells of Lynn! 

From the dark be'lfriea of yon cloud-cathedral 

wafted, 
your sounds aerial seem to float, O Bells of Lynn! 

Borne on the evening-wind across the crimson twi- 
light. 
O'er land and sea they rise and fall, O Bells of iLynn! 

The fisherman in his boat, tar out beyond the head- 
land, 
Listens, and leisurely rows ashore, O Bells of Lynn! 

Over the shining sands the wandering cattle home- 
ward 
Follow each other at your call, O Bells of Lynn! 

The distant lighthouse hears, and with bis flaming 

signal 
Answers you, passing the watchword on, O Bells of 

Lynn! 

And down the darkening coast run the tumultous 

surges, 
And clap their hands, and shout to you, O Bells of 

Lynn! 

167 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 



Till from the shuddering sea, with your wild incan- 

tatioiis, 
Ye summon up the spectral moon, O Bells of Lynn! 

And startled at the sight, like the weird woman of 

Endor, 
Ye cry aloud, and then are still, O Bells of Lynn! 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 



168 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 



NAHANT 

We have all loved certain places and have recalled 
them with the half melancholy, half smiling thrill of 
myriad associations. When we drift with Story back 
to his remembrances of happy days at Nahant, our 
personal reverie is enriched by companionship with 
one of the choicest spirits that New England ever 
produced. And we muse with him about the spell 
of a place which will always be tenderly treasured in 
the history of the North Shore. 

WETMORE COTTAGE 

The hours on the old piazza 

That overhangs the sea 
With a tender and pensive sweetness 

At times steal over me; 

And again o'er the balcony leaning, 
We list to the surf on the beach. 

That fills with its solemn warning 
The intervals of speech. 

We three sit at night in the moonlight, 
As we sat in the summer gone, 

And we talk of art and nature. 
And sing as we sit alone; 

We sing the old songs of Sorrento, 
Where oranges hang o'er the sea, 

And our hearts are tender with dreaming 
Of days that no more shall be. 

How gayly the hours went with us 
In those old days that are gone, 

Ah! would we were all together, 
Where now 1 am standing alone. 

Could life be again so perfect? 

Ah, never! these years so drain 
The heart of its freshness of feeling. 

But I long, though the longing be vain. 

WiUiamlWelmore Story. 

169 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 
NAHANT 

It is rather impressive to read again the sonnet that 
Longfellow wrote to Agassiz at Nahant, and to recall 
that both were loved and familiar figures here in 
*'its golden days." 

AGASSIZ 

I stand again on tlie familiar shore, 
And hear the waves of the distracted sea 
Piteously calling and lamenting thee, 
And waiting restless at thy cottage door. 
The rocks, the seaweed on the ocean floor, 
The willows in the meadow, and the free 
Wild winds of the Atlantic welcome me; 
Then why shouldst thou be dead, and come no more? 
Ah, why shouldst thou be dead, when common men 
Are busy with their trivial affairs. 
Having and holding? Why, when thou hadst read 
Nature's mysterious manuscript, and then 
Wast ready to reveal the truth it bears. 
Why art thou silent? Why shouldst thou be dead? 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 



170 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 



SALEM 

William Wetmore Story's temperament was well 
fitted to reflect the Salem which cast a spell over his 
childhood, and to which he has done most admirable 

^"^*"" SALEM 

Swift fly the years. Too swift, alas! 

A full half-century has flown, 

Since, through these gardens fair and pastures lone 

And down the husy street, .v^^^n 

Or 'neath the elms whose shadows soft are thrown 

Upon the common's trampled grass, 

Pattered mv childish feet. 

Gone are the happy games we played as hoys. 

Gone the glad shouts, the free and careless Joys, 

The fights, the feuds, the friendships that we had, 

And all the trivial things that had the power, 

Wlhen youth was in its early flower. 

To make us sad or glad! 

Gone the familiar faces that we knew. 

Silent the voices that once thrilled us through. 

And ghosts are everywhere! 

***** 
They peer from every window-pane, 
From every alley, street, and lane 
They whisper on the air. 

Ah me, how many an autumn day 
We watched with palpitating breast 
Some stately ship, from India or Cathay, 
Laden with spicy odors from the East, 
Come sailing up the bay! 
Unto our youthful hearts elate 

171 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 



What wealth beside their real freight 

Of rich material things they bore! 

Ours were Arabian cargoes, fair, 

Mysterious, exquisite, and rare; 

From far romantic lands built out of air 

On an ideal shore 

Sent by Aladdin, Camaralzaman, 

Morgiana, or Badoura, or the Khan, 

Treasures of Sinbadi, vague and wondrous things 

Beyond the reach of aught but Youth's Imaginings. 



How oft half-fearfully we prowled 

Around those gabled houses, quaint and old, 

Whose legends, grim and terrible. 

Of witch and ghost that used in them to dwell, 

Around the twilight fire were told; 

While huddled close with anxious ear 

We heard them quivering with fear, 

And, if the daylight half o'ercame the spell, 

'T was with a lingering dread 

We oped the door and touched the stinging bell 

In the dark shop that led. 

For some had fallen under time's disgrace. 

To meaner uses and a lower place. 

But as we heard it ring, our hearts' quick pants 

Almost were audible; 

For with its sound it seemedi to rouse the dead 

And wake some ghost from out the dusky haunts 

Where faint the daylight fell. 

Upon the sunny wharves how oft 

Within some dim secluded loft 

We played, and dreamed the livelong day, 

And all the world was ours in play; 

We cared not, let it slip away. 

And let the sandy hour-glass run, 

Time is so long, and life so long 

When it has just begun. 

William Wetmore Story. 



172 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 



MARBLEHEAD 

Skipper Ireson's ride needs no foreward. Whether 
or not the skipper has been unjustly blamed — there 
has been some controversy on this point — the vigorous 
verses will always remain one of the best things that 
Whittier ever did and one of Marblehead's unique 
possessions. 

SKIPPER IRESON'S RIDE 

Of all the rides since the birth of time, 

Told in story or sung in rhyme, — 

On Apuleius's Golden Ass, 

Or one-eyed Calendar's horse of brass, 

Witch astride of a human back, 

Islam's prophet on Al-Borak, — 

The strangest ride that ever was sped 

Was Ireson's out from Marblehead! 

Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, 

Tarred and feathered and carried in « cart 

By the women of Marblehead! 

Body of turkey, head of owl. 
Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl, 
Feathered and ruffled in every part. 
Skipper Ireson stood in the cart. 
Scores of women, old and young, 
Strong of muscle, and glib of tongue. 
Pushed and pulled up the rocky lane, 
Shouting and singing the shrill refrain: 
"Here's Flud Olrson, fur his horrd horrt, 
Torr'd an' futherr'di an' corr'd in a corrt 
By the women o' Morble'ead!" 

173 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

Wrinkled scolds with hands on hips, 

Girls in bloom of cheek and lips, 

Wild-eyed, free-limbed, such as chase 

Bacchus round some antique vase. 

Brief of skirt, with ankles bare, 

Loose of kerchief and loose of hair, 

With conch-shells blowing and fish-horns' twang, 

Over and over the Maenads ;sang: 

"Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, 

Torr'di an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt 

By the women o' Morble-ead ! " 

Small pity for him! — He sailed away 
From a leaking ship, in Chaleur Bay, — 
Sailed away from a sinking wreck, 
With his own townspeople on her deck! 
"Lay by! Lay by!" they called to him. 
Back he answered, "Sink or swim! 
Brag of your catch of fish again!" 
And off he sailed through the fog and rain ! 
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, 
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart 
By the women of Mafblehead! 

Fathoms deep in dark Chaleur 
That wreck shall lie forevermore. 
Mother and sister, wife and maid. 
Looked from the rocks of Marblehead 
Over the moaning and rainy sea, — 
Looked for the coming that might not be! 
What did the winds and the sea-birds say 
Of the cruel captain who sailed away? — 
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart. 
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart 
By the women of Marblehead! 

Through the street, on either side. 
Up flew windows, doors swung wide; 
Sharp-tongued spinsters, old wives gray, 
Treble lent the ifish-hom's hray. 
Sea-worn grandsires, cripple-bound. 
Hulks of old sailors run aground, 
Shook head and fist and hat and cane, 
And cracked with curses 'the hoarse refrain: 
"Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, 
Torr'd an' futherr'd an' eorr'd in a oorrt 
By the women o' Morble'ead!" 

174 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

Sweetly along the Salem road 
Bloom of orchard and lilac showed. 
Little the wicked skipper knew 
Of the fields so green and the sky so blue. 
Riding there in his sorry trim, 
iLike an Indian idol glum and grim, 
Scarcely he seemed the sound to hear 
Of voices shouting, far and near: 
"Here's Flud Olrson, fur his horrd horrt, 
Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt 
By the women o' Morble-ead!" 

"Hear me, neighbors!" at last he cried, — 

"What to me is this noisy ride? 

What is the shame that clothes the skin 

To the nameless horror that lives within? 

Waking or sleeping, I see a wreck, 

And hear a cry from a reeling deck! 

Hate and curse me, — I only dread 

The hand of God and the face of the dead!" 

Said old Floyd Ireson for his hard heart, 

Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart 

By the women of Marblehead! 

Then the wife of the skipper lost at sea 

Said, "God has touched him! — Why should we?" 

Said an old wife mourning her only son, 

"Cut the rogue's tether and let him run!" 

So with soft relentings and nide excuse, 

Half scorn, haLf pity, they cut him loose, 

And gave him a cloak to hide him in, 

And left him alone with his shame and sin. 

Poor Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, 

Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart 

By the women of Marblehead! 

John Greenleaf Whittier. 



175 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 



MARBLEHEAD 

The story of Agnes Surriage will never fail to stir 
the romantic fancy. Some novels, and many stories 
have been based upon this tale and Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, who delighted in New England legends, 
found here a theme particularly attractive to him. 
The following description is of the Frankland mansion 
at Hopkinton, Massachusetts. 

THE FRANKLAND MANSION 

One hour we rumble on tlie rail, 

One half-hour guide the rein, 
We reach at last, o'er hill and dale. 

The village on the plain. 

With blackening wall and mossy roof. 

With stained and warping floor, 
A stately mansion stands aloof, 

And bars its haughty door. 

This lowlier portal may be tried. 

That breaks the gable wall; 
And lo! with arches opening wide, 

Sir Harry Frankland's hall! 

'Twas in the second George's day 

They sought the forest shade, 
The knotted trunks they cleared away, 

The massive beams they laid. 

They piled the rock hewn chimney ^tall. 
They smoothed the terraced ground. 

They reared the marble-pillared wall 
That fenced the mansion round. , 



176 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

Far stret€hed beyond the village bound 

The Master's broad domain; 
With page and valet, horse and hound, 

He kept a goodly train. 

And, all the midland county through, 
The ploughman stopped to gaze 

Whene'er his chariot swept in view 
Behind the shining bays. 

With mute obeisance, grave and slow, 

Repaid by nod polite, — 
For such the way with high and low 

Till after Concord fight. 



I tell you, as my tale began. 

The Hall is standing still; 
And you kind listener, maid or man, 

May see it if you will. 

The box is glistening huge and green, 

Like trees the lilacs grow. 
Three elms high-arching still are seen. 

And one lies stretched below. 

The hangings, rough with velvet flowers. 

Flap on the latticed wall; 
And o'er the mossy ridge-pole towers 

The rock-hewn chimney tall. 

Thus Agnes won her noble name, 

Her lawless lover's hand; 
The lowly maiden so became 

A lady in the land! 

The tale is done; it little needs 

To track their after ways 
And string again the golden beads 

Of love's uncounted days. 

177 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

They leave the fair ancestral isle 
,For bleak New England's shore; 

How gracious is the courtly smile 
Of all who frowned before. 

Again through Lisbon's orange bowers 

They watch the river's gleam, 
And shudder as her shadowy towers 

Shake in the trembling stream. 

Fate parts at length the fondest pair; 

His cheek, alas! grows pale; 
The breast that trampling death could spare 

His noiseless shafts assail. 

He longs to change the heaven of blue 

For England's clouded sky, — 
To hreathe the air his boyhood knew; 

He seeks them but to die. 

The doors on mighty hinges clash 

Wlith massive bolt and bar. 
The heavy English-moulded sash 

Scarce can the night-winds jar. 



A graded terrace yet remains; 

If on its turf you stand 
And look along the wooded plains 

That stretch on either hand. 

The broken forest walls define 

A dim, receding view. 
Where, on the far horizon's line. 

He cut his vista through. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes. 



178 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 



BEVERLY 

Poems that were popular a generation or two ago 
are quite unknown to many of America's newest 
children. To read them is like becoming introduced 
to the mahogany dresser and the worked samplers 
which were the accepted part of our grandmothers 
day. Lucy Larcom explained to curious questioners 
that Hannah's habitat was not very definitely located 
in the mind of the writer. ''Somewhere on the road 
to Beverly," she hazarded. But the pathetic little 
story that was quoted so widely when it first made its 
appearance, would be true of almost any of the 
North Shore villages. 

HANNAH BINDING SHOES 

Poor lone Hannah, 

Sitting at the window, binding shoes. 

Faded, wrinkled. 

Sitting, stitching, in a mournful muse. 

Bright-eyed beauty once was she. 

When the bloom was on the tree: 

Spring and winter, 
Hannah's at the window, binding shoes. 

Not a neighbor 
Passing nod or answer will refuse 

To her whisper, 
"Is there from the fishers any news?" 
Oh, her heart's adrift, with one 
On an endless voyage gone! 

NigOi't and morning, 
Hannah's at the window, binding shoes. j 

179 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

Fair young Hannah, 
Ben, the sunburnt fisher, gayly wooes: 

Hale and clever, 
For a willing heart and hand he sues. 

May-day skies are all aglow. 

And the waves are laughing so! 
For her wedding 
Hannah leaves her window and her shoes. 

May is passing: 
Mid the apple boughs a pigeon cooes. 

Hannah shudders, 
For the mild southwesiter mischief brews, 
Round the rocks of Marblehead, 
Outward, bound, a schooner sped: 

Silent, lonesome, 
Hannah's at the window, binding shoes. 

'Tis November, 
Now no tear her wasted cheek bedews. 

From Newfoundland 
Not a sail returning will she lose. 

Whispering hoarsely, "Fishermen 

Have you, have you heard of Ben?" 
Old with watching, 
Hannah's at the window, binding shoes. 

Twenty winters 
Bleach and tear the ragged shore she views. 

Twenty seasons: — 
Never one has brought her any news. 
Still her dim eyes silently 
Chase the white sails o'er the sea: 
Hopeless, faithful, 
Hannah's at the window, binding shoes. 

Lucy Larcom. 



180 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 



MAGNOLIA 

American ballads are rare, and this excellent one 
is destined to live in the annals of American literature. 
It may interest the reader to know that the name of 
Norman's Woe came from the family named Norman 
who lived near the fated spot. Longfellow, impressed 
by the news of the wreck here, wrote the ballad in one 
night — easily, he said, and practically in the form in 
which it now stands. 

THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS 

It was the schooner Hesperus, 

That sailed the wintry sea; 
And the skipper had taken his little daughter, 

To bear htm company. 

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax. 

Her cheeks like the dawn of day, 
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds. 

That ope in the month of May. 

The skipper he stood beside the helm, 

His pipe was in his mouth. 
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow 

The smoke now west, now south. 

Then up and spake an old sailor, 

Had sailed to the Spanish Main, 
"I pray thee, put into yonder port, 

For I fear a hurricane. 

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring, 

And to-night no moon we see!" 
The skipper, he blew a whiff from liis pipe, 

And a scornful laugh laughed he. 

181 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 



Colder and louder blew the wind, 

A gale from the northeast, 
The snow fell hissing in the brine 

And the billows frothed like yeast. 

Down came the storm, and smote amain 

The vessel in its .strength; 
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed, 

Then leaped her cable's length. 

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter, 

And do not tremble so; 
For I can weather the roughest gale 

That ever wind did blow." 

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat 

Against the stinging blast; 
He cut a rope from a broken spar, 

And bound her to the mast. 

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring, 

O say, what may it be?" 
"Tis a fog bell on a rock-bound coast!" 

And he steered for the open sea. 

"O father! I hear the sound of guns, 

O say, what may it be?" 
"iSome ship in distress that cannot live 

In such an angry sea!" 

"O father! I see a gleaming light, 

O say, what may it be?" 
But the father answered never a wond, 

A frozen corpse was he. 

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark, 
With his face turned to the skies, 

The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow 
On his fixed and glassy eyes. 



182 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

Then the maiden clasped her hand ,and prayed 

That saved she might be; 
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave, 

On the a:^ake of Galilee. 

And fast through the midnight dark and drear, 
Through the whistling sleet and snow. 

Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept 
Towards the reef of Norman's Woe. 

And ever the fitful gusts between 

A sound came from the land; 
It was the sound of the trampling surf 

On the rocks and the hard sea-sand. 

The breakers were right beneath her bows, 

She drifted a dreary wreck, 
And a whooping billow swept the crew 

Like icicles from her deck. 

She struck where the white and fleecy waves 

Looked soft as carded wool. 
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side 

Like the horns of an angry bull. 

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice, 
With the masts went by the board; 

Like a vessel of glass she stove and sank, 
Ho! ho! the breakers roared! 

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, 

A fisherman stood ag*hast, 
To see the form of a maiden fair 

Lashed close to a drifting mast. 

The salt sea was frozen on her breast. 

The salt tears in her eyes; 
And he saw her hair, like the brown seaweed, 

On the billows fall and rise. 

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, 

In the midnight and the snow! 
Christ save us all from a death like this. 
On the reef of Norman's Woe! 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
183 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 
GLOUCESTER 

The North Shore is burdened with tragedies simple 
and profound. This homely rendering of an incident, 
perhaps not more typical of Gloucester than of any 
of the old coast fishing towns, preserves something 
of the superstition that frequently attaches itself to 
such episodes. 

THE PHANTOM BOAT 

The tide comes in, and the tide goes out, 
And the rollers break on the harbor bar, 

And up from the distance comes a sail, 
Gleaming white, 'neath the morning star. 

Fishing tackle and boats on deck. 
Running rigging, belayed and trim; 

Raking spars, — 't is no battered wreck 
Sailing out in the distance dim. 

It draws not near, though the wind is fair, 
The sheets are free, but it comes not nigh. 

But hangs, a point on the morning air, 
A pictured sail, 'twixt the sea and sky. 

"Fisherman, tell me why yonder boat 
Sails, and no nearer comes to shore; 

Nor in the distance grows remote. 
Nor a ripple her bow breaks o'er." 

"Stranger, I reckon you aren't here long: 

Many a year her pennant flew. 
Old is the story; a worn-out song. 

But her deck is trod by no mortal crew. 

"Look a moment, and see the flame 
Gleaming white over mast and spar; 

Here, take my glass; you can read the name 
Under her stam; 't is the Alice Marr. 

"Alice Marr was a fair young girl, 

Long ago in Glos'ter town; 
Rippling tresses and sunny curl, 

Rare red lips, and a cheek of brown. 

184 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

"That was Alice, the fisher's pride; 

Lovers sought her from near and far; 
She was John Ackman's promised hride; 

He named his vessel the Alice Marr. 

"Thar's nothing sartin, stranger, in life; 

We're gone to-morrow, though here today: 
Another v'yage she would be his wife, 

At least so I've hearn the gossips say. 

"Pork, potatoes, and hard-tack stowed, 
Water in barrels and water in tanks, 
Nicely fixed for a three months' cruise, 
He sailed away for the fishing banks. 
******** 

"Months rolle/d on, and never a word; 

Six months, twelve months: on the day 
That finished the year was a rumor heard 

Of the Alice Marr in the outer bay. 

"Boats put out, but they drew not near. 

Slowly, silently, on she steered: 
'Skipper Ackman! Ho! what cheer!' 

She had vanished, had disappeared. 

"Ever, as rolls the year around 

Bringing again her sailing day, 
Rises her hull from the depths profound, 

And slowly cruises the outer bay. 

"Not a word of her master's fate; 

Only a glimmer of sail and spar; 
Not a word of her crew or mate,— 

This is the ghost of the Alice Marr. 

"Still she watched down the peaceful bay, 

Still her eye scanned each gathering cloud: 
Years receded, and, worn and gray, ^^ 

Her wedding dress was her funeral shroud. 
E. Normon Gunnison. 



185 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 



GLOUCESTER 

This rhyme of Whittier's is chiefly of value because 
it records the tragic occurance which is still commemo- 
rated in the name of Avery's Rock. It is admira- 
bly correct in the atmosphere not only of time and 
place but of the religious point of view of the period. 



THE SWAN SONG OF PARSON AVERY 

When the reaper's task was ended, and the summer 

wearing late, 
Parson Avery sailed from Newbury, with his wife and 

children eight, 
Dropping down the river-harbor in the shallop 

"Watch and Wait." 

Pleasantly lay the clearings in the mellow summer- 
morn. 

With the newly planted orchards dropping their 
fruits first-born, 

And the homesteads like green Islands amid a sea of 
corn. 

Broad meadows reached out seaward the tided 
creeks between, 

And hills rolled wave-like inlandi, with oaks and wal- 
nuts green; — 

A fairer home, a goodlier land, 'his eyes had never 
seen. 

Yet away sailed Parson Avery, away where duty led, 
And the voice of God seemed calling; to break the 

living bread 
To the souls of fishers starving on the rocks of 

Marblehead. 



186 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

All day they sailed; at nightfall the pleasant lan^di- 
breeze died, 

The blackening sky, at midnight, its starry lights de- 
nied. 

And far and low the thunder of tempest prophesied! 

Blotted out were all the coast-lines, gone were rock 

and wood and sand; 
Grimly anxious stood the skipper with the 'rudder in 

his hand. 
And ques-tloned of the darkness what was sea and 

what was land. 

And the preacher heard his dear ones, nestled round 

him, weeping sore: 
"Never heed, my little children! Christ is walking 

on before 
To the pleasant land of heaven, where the sea shall 

be no more." 

All at once the great cloud parted, like a curtain 

drawn aside. 
To let down the torch of lightning on the terror far 

and wide 
And the thunder and whirlwind together smote the 

tide. 

There was wailing in the shallop, woman's wail and 

man's despair, 
A crash of breaking timbers on the rocks so sharp 

and bare. 
And, through it all, the murmur of Father Avery's 

prayer. 

From his struggle in the darkness with the wild 

waves and the blast, 
On a rock, where every billow broke above him as it 

passed, 
Alone, 01 all his household, the man of God was cast. 



187 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

There a comrade heard him praying, in the pause of 

wave and wind.* 
"All my own have gone before me, and I linger just 

behind; 
Not for life I ask, but only for the rest thy ransomed 

find!" 

The ear of God wais open to his servant's last re- 
quest; 

As the strong wave swept him downward the sweet 
hymn upward pressed, 

And the soul of Father Avery went, singing, to its 
rest. 

There was wailing on the mainland, from the rocks 

of Marblehead; 
In the stricken church of Newbury the notes of 

prayer were read; 
And long, by broad and hearthstone, the living 

mourned the dead. 

And still the fishers outbound, or scudding from the 
squall, 

Wath grave and reverent faces, the ancient ^ale re- 
call, 

When they see the white waves breaking on the 
Rock of Avery's Fall! 

John Greenleaf Whittier. 



188 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 



IPSWICH 

Ipswich has appealed to more than one writer's 
imagination and sense of respectful humor. 

IPSWICH TOWN 

I love to think of old Ipswich town, 

Old Ipswich town in the East countree, 
Whence, on the tide, you can A^a't down 

Through the long salt grass to the waUing sea, 
Where the Mayflower drifteSd off the bar. 

Sea-worn and weary, long years ago. 
And dared not enter, but sailed away 

Till she landed her boats in Plymouth Bay. 

I love to think of old Ipswich town; ,, ^^.„ 

Where Whitfield preached in the church on the hill, 
Driving out the idevil till he leaped down 

From the steeple's top, where they show you still, 
Imbedded deep in the solid rock. 

The indelible print of his cloven hool, 
And tell you the devil has never shown 

Face or hoof since that day in the honest town. 

I love to think of old Ipswich town; 

Where they shut up the witches until t^ie day 
When they should be roasted so thoroughly brown. 

In Salem village, twelve miles away; 
They've moved it off for a stable now; 

But there are the holes where the stout jail stood, 
And at night, they say, that over the holes 

You can see the ghost of Goody Coles. 



189 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

I love to think of old Ipswich town; 

That house to your right, a rod or more. 
Where the stern old elm-trees seem to frown 

If you peer too hard through the open door, 
Sheltered the regicide judges three 

When the royal sheriffs were after them. 
And a queer old villager once I met, 

Who says in the cellar they're living yet. 

I love to think of old Ipswich town; 

Harry Main, you have heard the tale, lived there: 
He blasphemed Grod, so they put him down 

With an iron shovel, at Ipswich Bar; 
They chaineid him there for a thousand years. 

As the sea rolls up to shovel it back; 
So, when the sea cries, the goodwives say 

"Harry Main growls at his work to-day." 

I love to think of old Ipswich town; 

There's a graveyard up on the old High Street, 
Where ten generations are looking down 

On the one that is toiling at their feet; 
Where the stones stand shoulder to shoulder, like 
troops 

Drawn up to receive a cavalry charge, 
And graves have been dug in graves till the sod 

Is the mould of goold men gone to God. 

I love to think of old Ipswich town; 

Old Ipswich town in the East countree. 
Whence, on the tide, you can float down 

Through the long salt grass to the wailing sea, 
And lie all day on the glassy beach, 

And learn the lesson the green waves teach. 
Till at sunset, from surf and seaweed brown. 

You are pulling back to Ipswich town. 

JamesAppleton Morgan. 



190 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 
IPSWICH 

What selection of New England poems would be 
complete without a contribution from Celia Thaxter — 
that bright and fanciful figure that glanced in and 
out of the Beacon Hill coterie and left a sparklting 
wake behind? Mrs. Thaxter has written better 
poetry than this, but perhaps nowhere else has the 
legend that all New England travellers must read 
been more pleasingly told. 

HEARTBREAK HILL 

In Ipswich town, not far from the sea, 

Rises a hill which the people call 
Heartbreak Hill, and its history 

Is an old, old legenld, known to all. 

The selfsame dreary, worn-out tale 

Told by all peoples in every clime. 
Still to be told till the ages fail, 

And there comes a pause in the marcli of Time. 

It was a sailor who won the heart 

Of an Indian maiden, lithe and young; 
And she saw him over the sea depart. 

While sweet in her ear his promise rung; 

For he cried, as he kissed her wet eyes dry, 
"I'll come back, sweetheart; keep your faith!" 

She said, "I will watch while the moons go by": 
Her love was stronger than life or 'death. 

So this poor dusk Ariadne kept 

Her watch from the hill-top rugged and steep; 
Slowly the empty moments crept 

While she studied the changing face of the deep, 



191 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

Fastening iier eyes upon every speck 

That crossed the ocean within her ken; 

Might not her lover be walking the deck, 
iSurely and swiftly returning again? 

The Isles of Shoals loomed, lonely and dim, 
In the northeast distance far and gray, 

Anldi on the horizon's uttermost rim 
The low rock heap of Boone Island lay. 

And north and south and west and east 

Stretched sea and land in the blinding light, 

Till evening fell, and her vigil ceased. 
And many a hearth-glow lit the nigiht, 

To mock those set and glittering eyes 
Past growing wild as her hope went out. 

Hateful seemed earth, anidi the hollow skies, 
Like her own heart, empty of aught but doubt. 

Oh, hut the weary, merciless days. 
With the sun above, with the sea afar — 

No change in her fixed and wistful gaze 
From the morning-red to the evening star! 

Oh, the winds that blew, and the birds that sang, 
The calms that smiled, and the storms that rolled, 

The bells from the town beneath, that rang 
Through the summer's heat and winter's cold! 

The flash of the plunging surges white. 

The soaring gull's wild holding cry, 
She was weary of all; there was no delight 

In heaven or earth, and she longed to die. 

What was it to her though the Dawn should paint 
With delicate beauty skies and seas? 

But the sweet, sad sunset splendors faint 
Made her soul sick with memories! 



192 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

Drowning in sorrowful purple a sail 
In the distant east, where shadows grew, 

Till the twilight shrouded it, coMi and pale, 
And the tide of her anguish rose anew. 

,Like a slender statue carved of stone 
She sat, with hardly motion or breath 

She wept no tears and she made no moan, 
But her love was stronger than life or death. 

He never came back! Yet faithful still, 

She watched from the hill-top her life away. 

And the townsfolk christened it Heartbreak Hill, 
And it bears the name to this very day. 

Celia Thaxter. 



193 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 



HAVERHILL 

Whittier's poetic gift never found more suitable 
material nor worked itself out in more enduring 
medium than in Snowbound. The loving minutesness 
of every small detail and the spirited scope of the 
simple human recital has crystallized the old fashioned 
New England winter to us forever. Snowbound is 
worth re-reading from start to finish. This fragment 
proves it. 

SNOWBOUND 

The sun that brief December day 
Rose cheerless over hills of gray, 
And, darkly circled, gave at noon 
A sadder light than waning moon. 
Slow trading down the thickening sky 
Its mute and omnious prophecy, 
A portent seeming less than threat, 
It sank from sight before it set. 
A chill no coat, however stout. 
Of homespun stuff could quite shut out, 
A hard, dull bitterness of cold. 
That checked, mid-vein, the circling race 
Of life-blood in the sharpened face, 
The coming of the snow-storm told. 
The wind blew east; we heard the roar 
Of Ocean on his wintry shore. 
And felt the strong pulse throbbing there 
Beat with low rhythm our inland air. 
Meanwhile we did our nightly chores, — 
Brought in the wood from out of doors. 
Littered the stalls, and from the mows 
Raked down the herd's-grass for the cows; 
Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; 
And, sharply clashing horn on horn, 
Impatient down the stanchion rows 

194 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

The cattle shake their walnut bows. 

While, peering from his early perch 

Upon the scaffold's pole of birch. 

The cock his crested helmet bent 

And down his querulous challenge sent. 

Unwarmed by any sunset light 

Tihe gray day darkened into night 

A night made hoary with the swarm, 

And whirl-'dance of the blinding storm, 

As zigzag wavering to and fro 

Crossed and recrossed the winged snow; 

And ere the early bedtime came 

The white drift piled the window-frame, 

And through the glass the clothes-line posts 

Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts. 

So all night long the storm roared on; 

The morning broke without a sun; 

In tiny spherule traced with lines 

Of Nature's geometric signs. 

In starry flake, and pellicle. 

All day the hoary meteor fell; 

And, when the second morning shone, 

We looked upon a world unknown. 

On nothing we could call our own. 

Around the glistening wonder bent 

The blue walls of the firmament. 

No cloud above, no earth below, — 

A universe of sky and snow! 

The ol'di familiar sights of ours 

Took marvelous shapes; strange idomes and towers 

Hose up where sty or corn-crib stood, 

Or gardeniwall, or belt of wood; 

A smooth white mound the brush^pile showed, 

A fenceless drift what once was road'; 

The bridle-post an old man sat 

With loose-flung coat and higih cocked hat; 

The well-curb had a Chinese roof; 

And even the long sweep, high aloof, 

In its slant splendor, seemed to tell 

Of Pisa's leaning miracle. 

John Greenleaf Whittier, 



195 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 



NEWBURYPORT 

Whittier was very fond of Newburyport, which 
he visited often toward the end of his life; and the 
staunch old record of Whitefield's career appealed 
to the Quaker's simple piety and lent itself well to his 
plain rhyming form. 

THE PREACHER 

Its windaws flashing to the sky, 
Beneath a thousand roofs of brown, 
Far down the vale, my friend and I 
Beheld the old and quiet town: 
The ghostly sails that out at sea 
Flapped their white wings of mystery, 
The beaches glimmering in the sun, 
And the low wooded capes that run 
Into the sea-mist north and south; 
The sand-bluff's at the river's mouth; 
The swinging chain-bridge, and, afar, 
The loam-line of the harbor-bar. 

Over the woods and meadow-lands 

A crimson-'tinted shadow lay 

Of clouds through which the setting day 

Flung a slant glory far away. 

It glittered on the wet sea-sands, 

It flamed upon the city's panes, 

Smote the white sails of ships that wore 

Outward or in, and glided o'er 

The steeples with their veering vanes! 

Awhile my Iriend with rapid search 
O'erran the landscape. "Yonder spire 
Over gray roofs, a shaft of Are; 
What is it, pray? "The Whitefield Church! 
Walled about by its basement stones 
There rest the marvellous prophet's bones." 

196 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

Then as our homeward way we walked 
Of the great preacher's life we talked; 
And through the mystery of our theme 
The outward glory seemed to stream. 
And Nature's self interpreted 
The doubtful record of the dead; 
And every level beam that smote 
The sails upon the dark afloat, 
A symbol of the light became 
Which touched the sihadows of our blame 
With tongues of Pentescotal flame. 



Under the church of Federal iStreet, 

Undier the tread of its Sabbath feet, 

Wialled about by its basement stones, 

Lie the marvellous preacher's bones. 

No saintly honors to them are shown, 

No sign nor miracle have they known; 

But he who passes the ancient church 

Stops in the shade of its belfry-porch, 

And ponders the wonderful life of him 

Who lies at rest in that chamel dim. 

(Long shall the traveller strain his eye 

From the railroad car, as it plunges by. 

And the vanishing town behind him search 

For the slender spire of the Whitefield Church; 

And feel for one moment the ghosts of trade 

And fashion and folly and pleasure laid, 

By the thought of that life of pure intent, 

That voice of warning yet eloquent. 

Of one on the errands of angels sent, 

And if where he labored the flood of sin 

Like a tide from the harbor-bar sets in. 

And over a life of time and sense 

The churoh-spires lift their vain defence, 

As if to scatter the bolts of God 

With the points of Calvin's thunder-rod, — 

Still, as the gem of its civic crown, 

Preci(ms beyond the world's renown, 

Hi3 memory hallows the ancient town. 

John Greenleaf Whitti&r. 
197 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 
NEWBURYPORT 

The intimate charm of aoy place is never delineated 
so well as by one who is part of that place and of that 
charm. The talented and vivacious Harriet Prescott 
Spofford caught the happy atmosphere of Plum Is- 
land and described the finest details with a precisioD 
that adds lasting value to the tuneful verses. 

INSIDE PLUM ISLAND 

We floated on the idle fbreeze. 

With all our sails a-shiver ; 
The shining tide came softly through, 

And filled Plum Island River. 



The shining tide stole softly up 

Across the wide green splendor, 
Creek swelling creek till all in one 
The marshes made surrender. 



Anldi clear the flood of silver swung 
Between the brimming edges, 

And now the depths were dark, and now 
The boat slid o'er the sedges. 

And here a yellow sand-spit foameld 
Amid the great sea meadows, 

And here the slumberous waters gloomed 
Lucid in emerald sihadows. 

While, in their friendly multitude 
Encamped along our quarter, 

The host of hay-cocks seemed to float 
With doubles in the water 



198 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

Around tlie sunny idistance rose 

A blue and hazy highland, 
And winding down our winding way 

The sand-hills of Plum Island, — 

The windy dunes that hid the sea 

For many a dreary acre, 
And muffled all its thunldering fall 

Along the wild South Breaker. 

We crept by Oldtown's marshy mouth, 

By reedy Rowley drifted, 
But far away the Ipswich bar 

Its white caps tossed and shifted. 

Sometimes we heard a bittern boom, 

Sometimes a piping plover, 
Sometimes there came the lonesome cry 

Of white gulls flying over. 

Sometimes, a sudden fount of light, 
A sturgeon splashed, and fleeting 

Behind the sheltering thatch we heard 
Oars in the rowlocks beating. 



But all the rest was silence, save 

The rippling in the rushes, 
The gentle gale that struck the sail 

In fitful swells and gushes. 

Silence and summer and the sun. 

Waking a wizard legion, 
Wove as we went their ancient spells 

In this enchanted region. 

No spectral care could part the veil 
Of mist and sunbeams shredded, 

That everywhere behind us closed 
The labyrinth we threaded. 

199 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

Beneath our keel the great sky arched 

its liquid) light and azure; 
We swung between two heavens, ensphered. 

Within their charmed embrasure. 

Deep in that watery firmament, 
With flickering lustres splendid 

Poised in his perfect flight, we saw 
The painted hawk suspended, 

And there, the while the boat-side leaned, 
With youth and laughter laden, 

We saw the red fln of the perch, 
We saw the swift manhaden. 

Outside, the hollow sea might cry. 
The wailing wind give warning; 

No whisper saddened us, shut in 
With sunshine and the morning. 

Oih, far, ifar off the weary world 

With all its tumult waited, 
Forever here with drooping sails 

Would we have hung belated! 

Yet, when the flaw came ruffling down. 
And round us curled anid sallied 

We skimmed with bubbles on our track. 
As glad as when we dallied. 

Broadly the bare brown Hundreds rose. 
The herds their hollows keeping, 

And clouds of wings about her mast 
From Swallowbanks were sweeping. 

While evermore the Bluff before 

Grew greenly on our vision, 
Lifting beneath its waving boughs 

Its grassy slopes Elysian. 



200 



FAMOUS POEMS OF THE NORTH SHORE 

There, all day long, the summer sea 
Creams murmuring up the shingle; 

There, all Iday long, the airs of earth 
With airs of heaven mingle. 

Singing we went our happy way, 

Singing old sings, nor noted 
Another voice that with us sang. 

As wing and wing we floated. 

Till hushed, we listened, while the air 

Wiith music still was beating, 
Voice answering tuneful voice, again 

The words we sang repeating. 

A flight of fluting echoes, sent 

With elfin carol o'er us, — 
More sweet than bird-song in the prime 

Rang out the sea-blown chorus. 

Behind those dunes the storms had heaped 

In all fantastic fashion. 
Who syllabled our songs in strams 
Remote from human passion ? 

What tones were those that caught our own. 

FUtered through light and Idlstance, 
And tossed them gayly to and fro 

With such a sweet insistence? 

What shoal of sea-sprites, to the sun 

Along the margin flocking. 
Dripping with salt dews from the deeps. 

Made this melodious mocking? 

We laughted,— a hundred voices rose 

In airiest, f airiest laughter; 
We sang,— a hundred voices quired 

And sang the whole song aifter. 



201 



THE ROMANTIC SHORE 

One standing eager in the prow 

Blew out his bugle cheerly, 
And far and wide their horns replied 

More silverly and clearly. 

And falling down the lalling tide, 
Slow and more slowly going, 
t'lown far, flown far, flown faint and fine, 
We heard their horns still blowing. 

Then, with the last delicious note 

To other skies alluring, 
Down run the sails; beneath the Bluff 

The boat lay at her mooring. 

Harriet Prescott Spofford. 



202 



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